


I'll Be Your Mirror (Reflect What You Are)

by stellardarlings



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Force Dyad (Star Wars), Post-Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Fix-It, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Spoilers, Time Travel Fix-It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-11
Updated: 2020-03-25
Packaged: 2021-02-28 04:48:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 30,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22658068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stellardarlings/pseuds/stellardarlings
Summary: When Ben disappears on Exegol, Rey refuses to let him go. Instead she follows their bond to try and bring him back from the beyond, and the Force is helpful in the way the Force often is: it sends her back to the day they met. She didn't intend to wake up strapped into the interrogation chair on Starkiller Base, but if this is how she gets Ben Solo back, then this is how she gets Ben Solo back.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 301
Kudos: 1040





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by @iamthesenate's [tweet](https://twitter.com/iam_thesenate/status/1225057436068929537): "AU WHERE REY TRAVELS BACK IN TIME TO PREVENT BEN'S DEATH BUT ACCIDENTALLY TRAVELS TOO FAR BACK TO TFA SO YOU HAVE A BESOTTED REY AND A CONFUSED DARK LORD WANNABE BEN SOLO"
> 
> I originally threw the idea around with my beta as a smutty joke and then it developed an actual plot. Word of warning: don't ever feed plot bunnies, even in jest, unless you're prepared to feed, house, and care for them.
> 
> Thanks to my aforementioned beta, reylonging on Tumblr, for her help in shaping this. My writing wouldn't be what it is without her input and feedback.

When Ben disappears, Rey refuses to let him go.

She knows about the World Between Worlds the way she knew how to heal: it was there in the ancient Jedi scrolls, a puzzle involving planets in the Unknown Regions and a way to move through space and time using the Force. If the last two years has shown her anything, it’s that somehow knowing that something is possible is enough for her to turn it into reality. Like the way she saw how to wield the Force from being in Ben’s head that first time. 

So, with her mouth still tingling where it had been pressed against his, with his body heat still thrumming through her skin, she refuses to panic when he falls back and fades out of existence. Her eyes sting with the tears she won’t let fall and she takes deep breaths to ground herself. Concentrate on something else—anger. Yes, anger will do. Anger is productive.

She’s read about Force bonds in the year since she refused his hand, enough to know what was going on between them, even if the word dyad had never come up before. But the emperor, that horrific, cackling wraith, hadn’t been lying when he told them their bond created life.

Rey is still alive. It seems clear to her that if she’s alive, Ben cannot be dead. Not really. He’s still there, a fragment of his soul tucked within hers, quiet and distant but not extinguished.

As she pulls herself to her feet, weary in ways that don’t make sense when she’s been revitalized by Ben’s life force, she rummages through her memory to figure out what to do next. She’d spent hours meditating and memorizing the stuff from the scrolls, whether it made sense to her or not, because she’d never known what she might need to know. Now she remembers the vague, half-formed theorem about the World Between Worlds from the text, and decides that’s the first place to start looking for him.

She clips both lightsabers to her belt and takes a glance around the ruins of Exegol. It’s mostly shadows and rubble, the maddening brush of all those Sith worshipers whispering now reduced to a desolate silence. 

She tips her head skywards. It is dark, and vast, and empty up there, but the sweetness of victory vibrates through the galaxy—an echo of the Resistance’s joy. That they left without waiting for her suggests they do not expect to see her again; that the Force sensitives in their numbers felt her fight and her sacrifice, and will pass on what they think happened. She’ll be celebrated as a hero, but she doesn’t have a place with them after that. Rebuilding the galaxy...she’s not a politician, doesn’t have the patience for it, and certainly doesn’t have any wisdom to dole out like they’ll be expecting. 

Fine. That makes her quest easier. She can slip into legend and not repeat Luke’s mistakes.

The silence surrounding her is good, it will help her concentrate. Not on her surroundings, but on the bond; the place inside her that’s  _ Ben _ . The knot of warmth behind her ribs which had bloomed open whenever there’d been physical contact between them, leaving them raw and exposed to each other’s minds, like it had been trying to merge their two spirits into one.

The knot is there, anchored below her heart, and she takes hold of it with the Force. She treats it like a rope, one she’s climbing, and at the other end it’s tied very securely in place, taking her where she needs to be.

She doesn’t have to walk far before Exegol changes. The shadows deepen, and she opens herself up to the Force, letting it guide her as she follows the trail of the bond. Sometimes she thinks she hears his voice, not a whisper but a low murmur in the corner of her mind, urging her on. Soon enough the murky gray surrounding her has become pitch black, and she can’t even see her own hand when she holds it in front of her face. The only thing keeping her going is the way she can still  _ feel _ Ben, even as her limbs begin to grow cold and numb.

Rey wanders for what could be hours or days before she realizes she isn’t getting any closer to Ben. He feels as distant from her as he had right after he faded away. At least she can feel him—the only thing she can feel. Hunger pangs have come and gone. Her lips were chapped with how thirsty she was. All this she’s experienced before on Jakku, and she thought she could push through it, but she can’t, not with how much Force she’s using up. 

She’s been an idiot. A lucky idiot. No right-minded person would have charged into a different plane of existence without knowing what they were doing, but she did, and now she’s trapped here without any way of finding her way out. Worse, the way that she’s slipping towards unconsciousness here on the unforgiving ground—and when exactly did she lie down—means that all of this was a waste. Ben healed her and died for her, just for her to throw it away immediately. He probably heard her coming and fled, not wanting to share  _ this _ plane of existence with her either.

Her last act is to bare her teeth and snarl into the shadows. She’s not going to die feeling sorry for herself. She’s going to die being angry, and making sure the Force knows about it. Only then does she let the blackness take over.

* * *

The Force has other plans for Rey.

* * *

She’s surprised to wake up. She’s even more surprised when she’s processed that fact and feels a creeping sense of deja vu, even before she opens her eyes. Her head feels heavy, like she’s done more than sleep naturally, and there’s something pressing across her body, keeping her pinned in place even though she’s upright. It’s not comfortable and she suspects it isn’t meant to be. The atmosphere around her is the filtered, slightly chilled air of a ship, and close by she can feel a familiar presence…

Rey opens her eyes. Kylo Ren—Ben—is crouched a few feet away from her, surveying her from behind his mask. The original mask, not the repaired version with its veins of red. For some reason he seems intimidatingly large even though this is far from the closest she’s ever been to him.

The room is familiar too, as her mind catches up with all that it’s busy absorbing and processing. She’s on Starkiller Base. Before it blew up. In the interrogation room. In the interrogation  _ chair _ .

Oh.

This is—not what she intended.

She struggles to contain her panic and collect her thoughts as Kylo remains watching her, apparently impassive. Even though she knows he’s anything but—that underneath that mask there are roiling, shifting, intense emotions, hidden from the world and the people around him. She wants that kriffing mask off of him, so she can see his face.

Ben’s face.

This second realization is as big as the first, but sweeter, infinitely sweeter. Ben is  _ here _ , in front of her, alive. She doesn’t know exactly what she’s done—gone too far in the World Between Worlds, traveling not just through space but through time as well—oh, she’s a fragging idiot—but does it matter when she’s back in a place where Ben still lives?

He’s waiting for something. Maybe for her to speak. All she knows is that she wants him to take that mask off, like he had done the first time.

The words from that first conversation come to her, like a script from those trashy holoserials Rose always played while they were in her workshop.

“Where am I?” she asks. She can still hear a thread of panic in her own voice. What is she supposed to do now she’s back here? Just live it all again? She doesn’t even understand why here, of all the times and places she and Ben have connected over the years. It’s not even the first time they’d met—that was on Takodana. Years ago to Rey, but in reality—this particular reality—it was only a few standard hours behind her.

“You’re my guest.” The sound of his voice through that awful modulator almost makes her shiver. She’d forgotten about that aspect of the mask too—most of the times they’d interacted, at least before he became Supreme Leader, she’d been able to watch the barely-veiled emotions ripple across his face. 

She pushes ahead. “Where are the others?”

“You mean the murderers, traitors, and thieves you call friends? You’ll be relieved to know I’ve no idea.” 

But her own question has helped Rey realize with mounting horror that, hours from now, Han Solo will die at Ben’s hand. And it will break Ben, putting him out of the reach of the Light until it is almost too late, when turning back to the Light is the last thing he will do.

She has to stop it. For Han’s sake. For Ben’s. Somehow, whatever the rules are—whether she’s here to stay and live through this life again, or will get sucked back into the World Between Worlds soon—she has to stop it all from happening.

“You still want to kill me,” he continues.

“That happens when you’re being hunted by a creature in a mask.” She finds the venom to sound convincing enough from somewhere. 

He rises to his full height and she holds her breath. She wonders if he can hear her heart pounding—not in fear, not like the first time around, but in anticipation. Anticipation of his face. Anticipation of him coming closer, almost touching her. It seems to take him minutes, long, slow, agonizing minutes, to reach up and release the mask. 

At first all she can see is the pale column of his neck. He shakes the hair out of his eyes, and now she remembers how curly his hair had been that first day, perfectly styled despite being crushed beneath the mask for hours. Not unkempt or drenched in sweat like later, like on Ahch-To, like when he’d offer his hand, and not as long as it was after he took his throne. She never touched it, not once—his fingertips and his face, but never his hair, and her hands twitch with the urge to bury her fingers in it. She’d never known that she wouldn’t ever get the chance and now he’s in front of her again, it’s all she wants to do.

At least until she focuses on his face. It knocks the breath out her like it did that first time, to see that long face, the high cheekbones, those dark eyes, intense as ever. All his wonderful features, big and incongruent and yet somehow so lovely together. His mouth is her focal point, pink and plump. This she had touched, but nowhere near as much as it deserved. 

He drops the helmet down onto the brazier and moves towards her. He has so many layers on, but when she’d seen him the first time, she’d thought him slight beneath all the armor. That moment of connection while she was on Ahch-To had disavowed her of that notion, as if the Force was trying to show her what she was missing. Now she’s seen him without a shirt  _ and _ in a thin undershirt, she wants the layers gone too. They confine him as much as the mask. They keep her hands from his skin, when that is exactly where her hands should be.

If only she could convince him to release her.

But, oh  _ stars _ , she’d forgotten how intense he could be. He isn’t using the Force yet, but she could feel him standing there even with her eyes closed, the way he’s absolutely laser focused on her. She doesn’t miss the way his gaze tracks to her mouth, then down to her chest, and is struck by the heavy recognition that he’d been attracted to her from the beginning. Like she’d been attracted to him, drawn together by the Force but each trying to deny it to themselves. 

“Tell me about the droid.”

It’s better without the voice modulator. He sounds like he should.

Oh. Right. Her script. “He’s a BB unit with a selenium drive and thermal hyperscan vindicator—” There. Again, his focus not on her face but her body, right before he cuts her off.

“He’s carrying a section of a navigational chart,” he says, glancing away like he’s realized he’s looking where he shouldn’t. “We have the rest, recovered from the archives of the empire, but we need the last piece and somehow you convinced the droid to show it to you.” This is where his voice turns disdainful, and she can’t help bristling in response. “You. A scavenger.” And now he speaks a fraction more quietly. More intimately. “You know I can take whatever I want.”

The words gust over her like a breath, leaving a mess of goosebumps in their wake. Originally it had been fear—that oddly seductive menace, mixed in with what she now understands was her body awakening. She’d been opening up to the Force, yes, but to Ben as well, the dyad chiming to life due to their proximity.

And with that thought about the dyad, she grasps why she’s here. She can already feel the connection inside her, and he's not in her mind yet, so it certainly wasn't created by Snoke or by what comes in a moment or two. Even if they'll never know how the dyad came to be, then at least she knows what dragged her back to their first moment of connection: the bond itself creates life.

She has a plan. One she hopes will save them all.

She abandons the script.

“You don’t need to take what’s freely given.”

He can only blink at her as she tips her face towards him, towards the gloved hand that is reaching for her. “What?” he murmurs, his forehead creasing into a frown.

“There’s so much you need to see.” She licks her lips. “Ben.”

He snarls at that, yanking his hand away like he’s been burned. “How do you—”

“I know you.” She meets his gaze, nods encouragingly. He tries to cover up his fear and confusion with a veil of anger, but she can see the truth. It’s there in the way his lips tremble, as he casts around the room for an anchor. “You’ll see.”

Some ghost from a different reality whispers words in the back of her mind.  _ So lonely. So afraid to leave. _ They’re so off the beaten path now.

She echoes his own words back to him.

“Don’t be afraid, I feel it too.”

Those deep, dark eyes widen, and she can see Ben peering out from within Kylo. So close, so tantalizingly close. “I don’t know what game you think you’re playing,” he spits. “If this is a trick—if this was engineered in some way by my mother—”

She shakes her head. “No trick. Nobody sent me. It’s just me, I came for you.”

“I won’t be distracted,” he vows, even as his jaw quivers. “Whatever you think you can do, it won’t work. I’ll have that map.”

“Okay,” she says quietly. She relaxes into the chair and waits for him to raise his hand again. There’s a tremble in that too and she wants to take it, to soothe him.

Soon.

She feels him prod at the edge of her mind, tentative and slow. It wasn’t like he’d ripped into her the first time they’d been here, but this time half of the fear is his. He’s trying not to set off the tripwire on any ambush she’s laid out, because he’s realized by now that she’s Force sensitive too. She should probably push back against him, like she had done, and at least try to keep him out of her head so it didn’t look too suspicious, but instead she’s mentally rolling out the welcome mat. She’s too damn ecstatic at that familiar brush of his energy, dark and rich and so fiercely him.

She’s got too much to show him.

At first, she keeps it light, and that’s not easy when everything between them has always felt so life or death. She casts a couple of memories in his direction—the first connection on Ahch-To, then the golden light and graze of fingertips in her hut there. She can feel his curiosity vibrating through the space they share. It draws him in deeper, to other memories; other moments where they connected. Delight unfurls within him as it begins to dawn on him that he was important to Rey, that maybe she really is here for him and him alone.

He’s in so deep she’s not sure where she ends and he begins. It gives him access to everything.

_ Everything. _

It rushes past her as Ben sinks all the way into her mind, submerging himself in her memories like he’s taken a dive into the ocean. The emotions, unearthed from where they rested, move too fast for her to catch onto any one of them and examine them. It’s not only her life since she met him that he explores; it’s all the way back to Jakku, all the way back to her parents…

_ “Come back!” _

And worse. His lightsaber buried in Han’s chest. Him offering her the entire galaxy and her turning him down, despite how torn she’d been. Leia’s passing. Their kiss, and Ben fading into nothing in her arms.

When he wrenches himself away, there are tears on his cheeks. On hers, too, judging by the salt in her mouth and the sting in her eyes. He is breathing so hard, his mouth moving like he’s trying to find the words and failing.

When the words do come, they lack conviction. “Lies.” His voice cracks and he swallows. “I—I don’t know how you’re doing this but it’s lies.”

“It isn’t,” she replies gently. “You know it’s real. You can feel the dyad as much as I can.”

There’s another glimmer of the little boy peering through the shattered mask of indifference, the boy who’d always felt cast aside and unwanted. “Then I die?” He’s furiously blinking tears away. “All of that—I become Supreme Leader and yet the Skywalker bloodline ends at Palpatine’s hands? It’s all for nothing?” 

He’s worked himself up to angry again, his default state, the only emotion he really knows how to wield, especially now. This time there’s a thready note of panic in his voice. 

“It doesn’t need to be.” She needs to touch him, to soothe him. She reaches for the mechanisms on her restraints with the Force to release herself, but nothing happens. 

_ Karking _ —she’s back to her untrained state. She remembers all the rules but she’s never actually wielded the Force and it won’t respond to her. She slumps back against the chair and tries to ignore her own alarm. Everything’s going to be a lot harder if they have to rely on Ben to do all the hard work.

“I think I’m here to help you,” she continues. “The Force sent me back to this moment for a reason—and I think it’s to rewrite what happened.”

“Is that so?” His eyes narrow. “To bring me back to the Light?”

“It’s not about—I don’t care about any of that! Not if it means losing you again.” She doesn’t mean to, but it’s all tangled up in a sob. Having all her memories, good and bad, ruffled through like that has left her raw.

He meets her gaze and stills. “Would you take my hand now? If I offered it to you?”

She returns his stare and hopes he can see all she feels. “If I did, would you turn your back on Snoke and the First Order?”

“And if  _ I _ did that for you?” He’s trying so hard not to seem eager, not to show her how much he wants this, but she has the advantage here: she knows him in ways she doesn’t think he knows himself. Not yet. He spent two years chasing her, despite her splitting his face in two, despite her every insistence that she would  _ never  _ be by his side, but he’d been so persistent. That persistence came from a place she knew well: loneliness. A need to belong to somebody.

That’s exactly what she can offer him. “Ben, I will give you everything. All of me. I  _ swear _ it.”

“Us, together? A dyad in the force?” 

His mouth is so close to hers. All of that fierce energy is pushing in her direction, reminding her of the times they’d been close—so close—to more than skimming fingertips. He’s looking at her like he had right after he’d offered her his hand, like he wanted to devour her. Like she’s something delicious and he can’t wait to taste her.

“I would burn the First Order down for that,” he says softly.

She thinks she’s probably staring at his lips the same way.

“Good,” she tells him. “We should do that.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey hates that Ben—Kylo—has put his mask back on. It’s necessary, for their plan to work: the whole of Starkiller Base can’t see him with mussed hair, flushed cheeks, and red, swollen lips. It’d raise too many questions, and she thinks most of the answers are plain on Kylo’s face anyway. The mask also hides his eyes. She can feel him watching her still but at least nobody else can see how he’s looking at her. His dark, hungry eyes, pupils blown, had disappeared behind inscrutable black and it’s for the best, really it is—
> 
> Even if she never wanted him to stop looking at her like that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who's reacted to the first chapter, your comments have made me very happy!
> 
> I am so excited about this chapter (ah, hubris) because it combines so much but came together really well when I was writing it. A lot of that is due to my beta, reylonging, and her constant nudging and tossing in suggestions that elevate my ideas into something beyond what I'd originally thought of.

Rey hates that Ben—Kylo—has put his mask back on. It’s necessary, for their plan to work: the whole of Starkiller Base can’t see him with mussed hair, flushed cheeks, and red, swollen lips. It’d raise too many questions, and she thinks most of the answers are plain on Kylo’s face anyway. The mask also hides his eyes. She can feel him watching her still but at least nobody else can  _ see _ how he’s looking at her. His dark, hungry eyes, pupils blown, had disappeared behind inscrutable black and it’s for the best, really it is—

Even if she never wanted him to stop looking at her like that.

His grip on her arm is firm and somehow he’s radiating heat even through the gloves. Her wrists are bound in shackles before her and isn’t this familiar? Only this time, there’s a plan, one they’ve actually discussed ahead of time. The shackles are for show—they’ll come off when they need to—and if her blaster still hangs at her hip, tucked underneath the flowing gauze she wears, well, it’s not like anybody can see it from how closely Ben is pressed against her as they stride down the corridors of the base. 

She looks like a prisoner being manhandled to a new destination. If she’s a flushed, sweaty mess too, at least it will be interpreted as fear. And truth be told there’s an undercurrent of that, but mostly it’s all down to Ben and his proximity.

There’d been a lot more proximity five minutes ago.

She can’t think of that. She can’t think of his fingers curled around her bicep, or his mouth, or how soft his hair is—she has to  _ focus _ .

* * *

“Are you sure this will work?” She stretches her limbs as the restraints click open, letting the blood flow back into them. 

He nods, stepping away from the interrogation chair to give her room to move. She’s left the strategy up to him; he knows the base and the Order far better than she does.

“Given everything you’ve shown me—” he’s looking away from her again, like he’s trying to stop himself from staring “—there’s no reason for anybody to suspect that I’m working against the First Order. They won’t see it coming.”

Like last time, there's a Stormtrooper standing guard outside the door. The idea of her persuading them with the Force—to persuade anyone—seems laughable right now. She gnaws at her lower lip, hating that although she can feel the Force, she's struggling to get a grasp on it.

His attention snaps to her mouth, his nostrils flaring and his tongue snaking out to moisten his own.

* * *

Stormtroopers pass by in pairs, unreadable and impassive, blasters gripped in front of them. Before, she’d known how to block their bolts or freeze them in mid-air, but she has neither saber nor her old skills. She’s reliant on Kylo in so many ways to protect her, and she doesn’t like the feeling, even if she  _ does _ trust him. Rey isn’t very good at stillness or waiting—she’s spent her life on the move, doing, making choices before they’re made for her.

Opening up the bond so early, throwing her mind wide to him instead of resisting and pushing back, seems to have wound them tighter together, earlier. The dyad likes that they’re being so unguarded with each other, rewarding them for it, even if Kylo needed a little coaxing to let her into his mind in return.

* * *

“I’m worried about my ability to fight alongside you, if it comes to that,” she tells him. “Everything I learned about how to wield the Force, I learned from you. That’s why we fought so well together.”

“I can teach you.” It’s not an offer—closer to a vow.

She smiles encouragingly. “I’m sure you can—you will. But we don’t have the time for that right now. Last time I took what I needed from you, enough to survive.”

“Enough to beat me.” Is that a hint of a smile from him? Surely not.

“I think I need that again.” 

This makes him stiffen in wariness. He wants her, he wants this all to be true so badly, but letting somebody into his head is anathema to him. Only now does he break the steady, intense eye contact. “I can show you what to do without that.”

“I know you can, but this will be quicker.” When his body language doesn’t relax, she switches tactics. “Could you take the gloves off? At least while we’re in here?”

One of his hands balls into a fist at his side, as if the notion somehow offends his sense of modesty, but it’s not modesty written across his face. He understands that she wants him to remove the gloves so they can have skin to skin contact—so they may touch fingertips together, like they did in another lifetime, or more—and there’s blatant yearning on his face. How long is it since he’s touched another person? Most of her lifespan, probably. It’s why the idea of such a simple touch is having the impact on him that it is. He’s starving for it.

He tugs the gloves off while she continues talking to him softly, and she draws him back into eye contact.

“You already have more power and skill than I do. The only reason I was able to get into your head in that other life was because you weren’t expecting it. This time—you can prepare yourself. Only show me what I need, what you’re comfortable with. You’ll be in complete control.”

She steps closer to him, like she’d done in the elevator, staring up at him imploringly, and it has the same effect on him now as it did then. He stares down at her with desperate eyes, his lips pressed together to resist the urge to move them, to stop himself from bending down and crushing them against hers.

Her voice is so low now. Somebody could be stood in the same room and only Kylo would be able to hear her speak.

“It’s your mind, Ben. I’m putting myself at your mercy when I’m in there.”

This seems to convince him. He nods, his shoulders loosening as he does so. She expects him to reach out and take her hand, as tentatively as they’d touched when she was on Ahch-To. Instead his palm comes to rest against her cheek, cupping her face. His fingers are so long that they stretch all the way into her hairline, his thumb resting in the hollow below her mouth. He’s blazing compared to the artificial chill of the base, heat and power trapped beneath his skin like a star ready to go supernova at any time. 

She can’t help nuzzling into his palm, pushing a gasp from him. A veil drops away from behind his eyes and he lets her in.

* * *

She’s still thinking of him as Kylo, though whenever she says his name out loud it’s always Ben. He might flinch from it now, but he’ll get used to it. He’s seen that moment—” _ I did want to take your hand; Ben’s hand _ ”—and knows that it’s Ben she really wants. He’s in there and she just needs to encourage him to discard his shell. Not right now. The mantle of Kylo is still required. His ruthlessness will be needed.

The closer they get to the command room, the busier the corridors get. Instead of patrolling Stormtroopers there are officers in dark uniforms, and they turn curious eyes to her. Some have knowing expressions—she supposes knowledge of the prisoner they took from Takodana has spread—but if they want to comment, they choose to give Kylo a wide berth. It’s amusing to her how much fear he inspires in other people when she doesn’t fear him at all anymore.

* * *

His mind is like she remembers it—pulsing with anger to cover the wounded child lurking in the shadows. So much darkness, but there are pinpricks of light in it, like stars. 

She moves cautiously, letting him show her what she needs to see rather than going looking for it.

There are—lessons. Things he learned as a child, even if they are poorly lit, as if that will somehow obscure the teacher. Things he learned as an adult that make her shudder away from Snoke and his awful, rasping voice. But she accepts it all eagerly, absorbing it into herself like he’s absorbed her experiences. Saber forms. The basics of shaping the Force into something useful. Mind tricks and levitation.

And then. He pulls her in deeper. She expects the shadows to thicken, but instead the stars brighten. She’s swept in the eddy of all that he is, a slipstream of memories and emotions, and she can feel his thrill at her basking in it. Somewhere underneath all of this, the wounded boy is waiting for her to come embrace him and let him out, but she lets herself flow through all of Ben, showing him there is no part of him that she will turn away from.

She’s pulled back to her body by the sweep of his thumb across her lower lip. 

They’re on their knees, somehow. Foreheads pressed together, though his hand still spans her face. The other hand has found hers, twining their fingers together. They blink at each other, dizzy and unfocused.

Rey knows what he wants to do, but he’s holding back. Despite the way he’s staring at her like she’s something precious, a naked kind of greed that’s tender at the same time, he doesn’t move. Only his thumb remains resting on her lip.

He’s never done this. She’s done this—once. So she takes the lead.

She only intends to wet her mouth but her tongue ends up flicking across his thumb, and all the air seems to leave him. She darts towards him artlessly, pressing her lips to his like she did on Exegol. His are so, so soft under hers.

She’s—she’s not really sure if there’s more to it. She’s ready to move away when the hand that had been cupping her face moves to the back of her neck, caressing the skin there, summoning goosebumps to dance down her spine. He keeps her against him, tilting his head a little more, and his mouth is insistent against hers.

It goes from chaste inexperience to the pair of them catching fire within seconds. 

* * *

He really does stomp around with barely concealed menace. And his legs are so much longer than hers that when he pulls ahead into the command room, he’s practically dragging her along while she struggles to keep up.

The staff glance up with varying degrees of alarm at his entrance but continue with their work, as if him barging into their space vibrating with unleashed tension is an everyday occurrence. It strikes Rey that it probably is.

He comes to an abrupt halt in the middle of the floor, and a few officers sneak wary glimpses over their shoulders. 

“You—” Kylo snarls at one officer, advancing on her while she flinches away.  A small device in his open palm glints. “I need the contents of this data-chip transmitting to these channel coordinates. Securely.” His voice modulator adds an edge of threat to the command that Rey doesn’t think is actually intentional.

Have they ever seen his face? Do they know what lies beneath the mask, or do they imagine him to be like Rey had before he’d removed the helmet, some kind of creature who was too horrible to go around being seen? They definitely don’t see him as—as human, or their equal, or anybody worth paying attention to except to protect themselves from his anger.

This is Snoke’s work. Isolating Ben, feeding him poison to keep him separated from everybody around him so that while his words stoke Ben’s ego, underneath it Ben is left to feel more unloved and lonely, like it is inevitable that he will always be rejected. She wants to put Ben’s lightsaber through Snoke herself, though if all goes well, that won’t be necessary…

Kylo thrusts the data-chip at the officer along with a scrap of flimsi containing the channel sequence. She takes both without questioning or challenging and nods, inserting the chip into a slot on her machine and beginning to type. Rey’s quiet presence is drawing more attention now, and she can almost hear them connecting her with the contents of the data-chip. Let them think it’s Luke Skywalker’s location. Let them think Kylo’s bested her and got the information out of her.

“How long?” he demands.

“Sir?”

“For the message to be relayed. It’s time critical.”

“Two or three minutes at most.” She frowns at the screen. “The information is being transmitted, though the receiving channel isn’t acknowledging.”

“That’s not important.” And it’s not, because the Millennium Falcon isn’t expecting to receive a transmission from the First Order under Kylo’s code. But it’ll be there, stored and ready to decrypt, when they’re ready to. “Prepare my ship,” he barks at nobody in particular. The officers exchange glances, silently debating their response.

The youngest officer, a pale boy who seems even younger than Rey, loses the silent dispute and opens his mouth. “The Supreme Leader has requested your presence, Sir.” The subtext is clear: we can’t let you leave until you’ve spoken to him.

Kylo’s sigh comes out as more of an intimidating rattle. “I have communed with him. The situation is resolved.”

“But—”

“It’s not a request.” The way his voice has gone very quiet is eerie and even Rey feels a lick of unease. “Prepare. My. Ship.”

“Sir,” the boy acquiesces, nodding and turning back to his station to relay the order to the hanger.

From the corner of her eye, Rey can see the timer of the data transmission counting down. It’s at fifty percent already. They just need to stall until it hits one-hundred, and then—

Kylo has loosened his grip on her arm, and nobody but her knows it’s deliberate. When he turns, steering her back towards the exit, she twists free.

Rey drops to the floor, rolling in the confined space, and it’s harder than normal with her hands bound, but she doesn’t need to get back up. Instead she’s landed right next to another startled officer, and having her hands shackled like this doesn’t stop her from grabbing the blaster from his hip-holster. She sets it to stun and fires a burst up at the man, then the officer on her other side, who both slump down in their chairs.

She scuttles backwards until her back hits the console, the blaster pointed upwards at Kylo. He advances on her with all of his intimidating bulk and when she fires at him, the bolt freezes in mid-air. He tosses it aside, where it hits a screen and elicits a rain of sparks.

His saber is barely in his hand—not even ignited—when all the nearby officers scatter out of range. They’ve got blasters and could—should—be firing at Rey but they seem to have opted to stay out of this fight. It means none of them are nearby when his saber crackles to life and he turns from Rey, sending the blade arcing through the central console.

The one sending the transmission. The one that emitted a quiet  _ bip _ moments before, a notification that it had finished, lost underneath the sounds of blaster fire and the hum of an unstable lightsaber. Unless you were listening for it.

“You think you can escape me?” he yells in Rey’s direction, rounding on another bank of machines and swiping through them too. “I am the Master of the Knights of Ren! You think I’ll show you  _ mercy _ ?” 

Rey stiffens as if she’s been frozen like that bolt, letting go of the blaster so it clatters to the ground. Kylo grabs her by the arm again, hauling her up to her feet not at all delicately while the officers gape at the damage he’s done. She’s panting from the burst of action and hoping it reads as fear to them. The heat his saber blade is spitting out next to her throat helps.

“Sir—sir, that was the central communication console!” the boy protests. Too late.

“That’s not my concern.” Kylo doesn’t turn his masked face away from Rey to look at the gathered officers.

“Yes, I understand, but we’re completely cut off right now. From the Supreme Leader, from the fleet, from each other—”

“Then fix it.”

This time he succeeds in dragging Rey out of the room. She doesn’t even pretend to put up a fight. When the door slides shut behind them, Kylo slices his blade through the exterior control panel. Trapping everyone in the command room inside.

“We did it,” Rey whispers, and she wishes she could see his face right now. It’s unnerving, not being able to see what he feels.

“We’re not done yet,” he reminds her, as they head off down another corridor. “And they’ll have the back-up systems online soon enough.”

Onto phase two, then. The more crucial part of their plan, although delivering all of the First Order’s security codes to the Resistance via the Millennium Falcon would be important later. For everything she and Ben can’t do on their own.

She just wishes they had time to celebrate this first successful phase. Somewhere quiet, alone, with his mask off and her fingers in his hair.

* * *

Rey is sort of—straddling one of Kylo’s thighs. Or at least, her knees are splayed on either side of one of his thighs, and she’s doing her best not to press herself against him. It’s not easy, given the way one of his hands is clutching her lower back, crushing her torso to his. His thigh is at least helping her keep her balance.

What they lack in skill they make up for with enthusiasm. She’s not sure who introduced tongues into the kiss. Maybe Kylo, who’s certainly taking the lead at the moment, with his other hand still cupping the back of her neck, allowing him to maneuver her head into whatever angle he wants. She doesn’t mind it—not the way he’s controlling the kiss, or the tongues. It was a little weird at first, shy and tentative and kind of…wet, but now she’s wondering why she ever thought this sounded off-putting when other people described it.

She’s discovering that kissing is about more than mouths. They do all of the work, but the fact that it’s him, and he’s being oddly gentle despite the way he’s trying to devour her, stirs things inside her. Her heart’s singing, and she’s smiling into the kiss, and she knows that if she were doing this with anybody else she wouldn’t feel like this at all.

As for her hands, they’re buried in his hair, and it’s as soft as she thought it would be. She’s tangling it up and she can’t help it, she’s rarely touched anything in her life that’s silky like this. Sometimes he makes little grunts and groans when she slides her fingers across his scalp, deep, hopeless sounds in the back of his throat, and they’re beautiful.

When he breaks away from her shakily, she follows her urge to find the source of those noises, burying her face in the column of his neck. His scent is stronger here—soap and faint sweat and something a little musky. She likes it all, even the sweat. She licks a stripe up his throat and mostly he tastes like salt, and when she drags her lips up the path where his vein pulses solidly, he lets out the loudest grunt of all.

Either he doesn’t like it, or he likes it too much, because in one swift movement he shifts them, pushing her onto her back on the floor and covering her body with his own.

* * *

Their next destination is the primary fire control room, which Kylo has explained is where they operate the starkiller cannon itself from. To Rey’s eyes it doesn’t look very different to the main command room, except that some of the officers in here are in teal uniforms instead of black or gray. 

Kylo’s entrance creates the same reaction everywhere: people stiffen, sidle away, pretend not to notice him. Which is an impressive feat given the sheer size of him and how every stomped footstep feels like a minor groundquake.

“Who’s in charge here?” he asks.

A pasty man in a winged cap rises from his chair and steps towards Kylo. Despite being nearly a head shorter, he gives no outward sign of being concerned about Kylo’s presence. “In General Hux’s absence, that would be me.”

“You are charging the cannon.”

“Correct, Sir.”

“The coordinates need to be changed.”

The man rocks onto his tiptoes in an attempt to look a little taller. “Excuse me?”

“The coordinates we’ve been given are a decoy. I’ve got the location of the true Resistance base from this scavenger.” He manages to add a good inflection of disgust on the last word, and gives Rey a contemptuous shake. She bares her teeth and growls at him.

“Get off me!”

Kylo ignores her. “We need to fire on these coordinates instead,” he says, handing another data-chip to the officer. 

“I only take orders from General Hux.”

“Comms are down,” Kylo tells him, with an edge of impatience in his voice. “Hux cannot be reached and time is of the essence. I’ve been informed the Resistance are about to launch a counterattack on this base. We need to strike first.” He grabs Rey’s face with one gloved hand, his grip just this side of painful on her jaw. “My methods are more reliable.”

She grunts again, pretending to try and pull away, while the officer hands the data-chip off to a lackey.

“Reset the cannon,” he commands. There’s the gleam of zealotry and greed in his eyes. Kylo’s already explained that most of the people within the order would happily step over the corpse of their own mother if it got them closer to power. Rey can almost see inside the officer’s head—how he’s imagining the praise and reward he’ll receive for wiping out the Resistance. “Let’s destroy them once and for all.”

She turns her eyes away in disgust.

“What are  _ you _ doing here?”

Kylo tenses at the sound of a new voice, and Rey feels a flutter of panic. She can’t turn her head with Kylo’s grip on her face, but she doesn’t need to; she’d recognize that greasy, contemptuous voice anywhere. 

Hux.

This is not part of the plan.

“Destroying the Resistance,” Kylo replies calmly. Too calmly.

Hux steps into view, his hands behind his back as usual. “Who’s she?”

“My source. She showed me where the Resistance are really hiding.”

Hux’s eyes narrow as he gives Rey a contemptuous inspection. “That’s already been established by our reconnaissance operatives.” He strides across to a central screen, which shows the location of the next target. “The unknown regions? What is the meaning of this?”

“D’Qar is a false trail. I’ve seen it in the scavenger’s head. Their leaders—Organa, Ackbar, Skywalker—are all there.”

Rey thinks her heart is going to leap out of her chest. Kylo’s fingers have tightened a little too much on her jaw and it’s starting to hurt. Worse, she can see that Hux doesn’t believe it—or doesn’t want to give Kylo the glory.

“No,” he replies. “We fire on D’Qar first. Then when the cannon has recharged we can fire on this other system. There’s plenty of bloodshed to go around.”

Rey has to bite her lip to stop herself from protesting—if she does, it will make it clear to Hux that there  _ is _ a Resistance presence on D’Qar.

“Then fire on the Jedi stronghold first,” Kylo insists.

“Ah. Yes.” His icy smile suggests he’s caught Kylo out. “The Jedi stronghold—I thought as much. I’m sure there is one Resistance leader out there, but  _ only _ one. Skywalker alone is not the priority. Are you letting personal business interfere with your mission?”

“This is my mission,” Kylo reminds Hux, dangerously low.

Throughout this, the officers have been watching the exchange between the two men like a game of claqball. Nobody’s made a move to change the coordinates back to D’Qar yet. Rey and Kylo have to ensure that when the cannon is charged and ready to fire, it does so on the new destination.

She lifts her face to look at the blank void of his mask and dips her head a fraction. The ghost of a nod she has to trust he’s seen. Then wrenches herself away, throwing herself in the direction of the machine controlling the cannon.

Rey doesn’t get far. Kylo’s hand shoves into her back, sending her stumbling to the floor. She lands on her outstretched arms, only just able to brace herself so she doesn’t fall on her face. Around her, she can see every officer in the room rising to their feet.

Kylo’s fist clenches, and they’re all knocked to the ground with a pulse of the Force too.

“Control yourself!” Hux yells. He’s on his knees, immediately pushing himself upright.

“I am,” Kylo replies, “in perfect control.” She hears the hum of his lightsaber spark to life again.

Rey shuts her eyes. Only for a moment, concentrating on the flow of the Force around her wrists. This used to be so easy, yet now the effort results in a trickle of sweat down her brow—but also the tiny click of release on the shackles. 

They fall off, unseen beneath her body, and she reaches for the hidden blaster.

The three nearest officers are down before anybody notices that she’s free and fighting back. Behind her, Hux gives a garbled scream before going silent—and all movement in the room stops.

She and Kylo are back to back, surrounded by a ring of enemies aiming weapons at them.

The familiarity almost makes Rey sway under the weight of her deja vu, but she tightens her grip on the blaster and fires off another bolt. The machine is unmanned, and everything depends on keeping people away from it and changing the coordinates back to D’Qar.

Some of the officers run, but their retreating backs make easy targets. The ones who remain pick her as the easier mark, opting to stay far away from Kylo. 

Not that he gives them a choice, diving out into the fight with large, graceful swings of his saber. He blocks the blaster bolts with his blade, and she trusts him to protect her back even though she can’t see what he’s doing. She can only feel it, his muscles tensing and releasing against hers as he moves. 

But he can’t protect her from all sides. She takes a dive to avoid being hit in her unprotected left side and finds herself sprawled at the foot of another officer, her blaster spinning away and out of reach.

“Rey!” She shoves herself backwards and can’t afford to glance at Kylo, but she can feel the little push of the Force behind her. She opens her hand, pulls on the Force in return, and his saber comes spiraling into her hand.

She ignites it into the chest of the officer about to fire on her, then thrusts both blade and man towards his comrades. They topple over, the blade sinking through all of them before she’s able to pull it free, leaving the air reeking like grilled puffer pig.

The room is silent except for her own harsh panting, but she can hear the rhythmic clatter of stormtroopers approaching in the distance. She tosses the saber back to Kylo, grabbing a new blaster from one of the hands of the teal-clad bodies on the floor. Kylo slams the door closed with the Force and it crumples in the frame.

“Do you think we can hold them off?” she asks. He nods, but there’s a stillness to him that suggests he’s listening to something that she can’t hear.

Except she can. Or at least, she can feel it, an oily taint in the Force, like a colony of sand-ants crawling over her skin.

“Ben—” she whispers, before the static cuts her off.

It’s the sound of the comms system coming back online. He was right, it didn’t take long for it to be restored. But more than that, the screen which fills one wall comes to life, beaming from somewhere far across the Galaxy.

There’s a slight delay, so they can only hear him at first, his cracking, wheezing voice reaching them before his moon-cratered face comes into view.

“What have you done, my young apprentice?” 

Snoke stares at Kylo with scorn and fury, and Rey has no idea how Kylo is reacting. She has her own shields up too high—she’s shielding like she’s never shielded in her life—and Kylo might as well be a statue.

“Ah,” Snoke continues, “I see.”

He turns his gaze to Rey and she refuses to meet it, keeping her focus on Kylo. Behind her, the cannon is almost primed—this is a distraction they don’t need.  _ He’s not real _ , she needs him to remember.  _ He was created to torment you and ruin you. _

“She’s a bonny thing,” Snoke says to Kylo. “I suppose that’s why the Resistance chose her. Do you think your mother personally helped pick her out?” Kylo’s shoulders twitch. “Such an obvious ploy, to try and lure you with the pleasures of the flesh. What a fool you’ll feel like when she’s led you to them and abandons you to a cold and lonely bed. Will you think she’s worth it when they tie a noose around your neck?”

“Shut up,” she spits and he cackles in response.

“Feisty little scavenger! What did they have to pay you to throw yourself at my apprentice, hmm? A few square meals—I’d imagine that seemed a fair price for such easy work.”

She lifts her chin. “I’m here for Ben because I care about him.”

Snoke grins and there’s not a shred of mirth in it. “I almost believed that. Maybe there’s a future for you on the stage.” He gestures to Kylo. “Come, now. Let’s be done with this childish nonsense.”

Kylo’s hands are tensed into fists, the leather of his gloves creaking with the strain. “I know it’s not a trick,” he tells Snoke.

A snort of derision from Snoke. “Of course it is. When have the light ever shown mercy towards you? I can offer you power and she—she doesn’t want  _ you _ . She wants a pale imitation of you, crippled by light, not who you really are. She won’t help you as I have helped you.”

Kylo’s face turns towards Rey but whatever expression he wears—whether peace, or anguish, or conflict—she has no way of seeing beneath the shroud of his mask. 

“Ben,” she pleads softly. He must know, he has to know—

But this time she understands him better. Even with the mask she knows his heart. There’s a faint pulse through the Force, like a restarted heartbeat, and she’s on her knees in the throne room once more, staring up at the man who is about to defy his master for her.

“I know the Force,” Kylo says to Snoke. “And the Force shows me her.”

* * *

He’s not—he’s not between her thighs. No, he’s lying alongside her, but it mostly feels like he’s trying to meld their bodies together. One big hand spans her waist, the other has laced fingers with hers again, and it’s a sweet gesture. What he’s doing with his mouth doesn’t feel sweet. The way one thumb is stroking across her ribcage, just barely brushing against the underside of her breast, is not sweet at all.

That doesn’t mean she wants him to stop doing it. In fact, she urges him upwards, but his movement stills.

“Not here,” he mumbles, then goes back to kissing her like she’s his sole source of oxygen.

He’s discovered that she responds very eagerly to the slightest graze of his teeth on her lower lip. A whimpering, writhing, kind of eager that has her wanting to insist on  _ yes, here _ , and has him holding her down firmly. Her heart is still full to bursting but now her skin feels too hot and too small for her body. When he nips at the line of her jaw it sends spasms of shivers through her, her belly clenching and a fresh burst of heat unfurling within her. It feels like a fever, but a good kind of fever.

Only the tension in his shoulders hints that maybe he’s as wrecked as she is. That is, until he opens his eyes and they’re just…gone, glazed with desire. 

Despite that, he’s the one to pull away. Not right then, but later, when the tension in him has turned into tremors. He pushes himself up, hovering above her, his weight braced on his forearms to put a little distance between them. All that strength… She follows him, of course, whining at the loss of his body heat, but he’s managing to blink the dazed expression away and presses her back down.

“We can’t stay here forever.” He clears his throat, and she takes it as direction, nuzzling back into his neck. It prompts him to roll upright, breaking the contact between them entirely. “If you want to do this, we have to go.  _ Now _ .”

She wants to keep protesting, but she knows he’s right. “Later,” she whispers. A promise, and his eager nod seals the vow between them. He runs his tongue over his lips, leaving them pink and shiny, and she has to dig her nails into the flesh of her palms to keep herself away from him.

* * *

Snoke is beyond furious, but that turns to astonishment with Kylo’s next words. “I know who you really are.”

It’s an excellent distraction. Snoke is so focused on Kylo, it allows Rey to swiftly key in the command for the cannon to fire. And though they haven’t discussed this, she adds a follow-up command when she realizes how easily rerouted some of the sub-commands are.

“Do you, boy?”

“You’re nothing but a puppet.” Kylo reaches up to remove his helmet, discarding it carelessly on the pile of bodies. 

Snoke is silent for the first time, and Kylo continues. There’s a thrum under their feet, barely noticeable. If Rey reaches out with the Force, she could touch it. Not that she wants to. The thrum is the blast from the cannon, spilling out across the galaxy towards its target. It’s a destructive energy, and she thinks it might flay her open if she got too close.

“All these years there’s been a whisper in my head. Sometimes I thought it was you. Mostly I thought it was my grandfather. But now I know the truth.”

The image of Snoke has already started to flicker, his face distorting into something new. His labored breathing shifts into a new sound.

“Do you?” he asks again, and while it’s a voice Rey has heard before, this is a man who was meant to die before Kylo was born, whose death was meant to be his grandfather’s one victory over him. 

Rey crosses the floor to grab Kylo by the hand, the way they’d faced the emperor before. Even if it hadn’t been this version of her man.

“Yes,” Kylo says. “You’re  _ her _ grandfather.”

The emperor’s smile, cold and merciless, drops away, leaving only blank shock in its place. “How can you possibly—”

“It’s too late,” Rey tells him quietly. “It’s over.”

She feels him atomize a moment before she witnesses it. The beam hits Exegol, disintegrating it all: the planet, its hidden cache of warships, the Sith faithful, and Palpatine himself. A balance to the destruction of the Hosnian system mere hours earlier. After one last distorted image of the emperor’s face frozen in a scream, the signal whites out and leaves the screen empty once more.

Rey doesn’t have time to contemplate that her last blood relative was just wiped from existence—beside her, Kylo staggers and crashes to his knees.

“What is it?” she asks, panicked. 

He’s already pushing himself back to his feet, shaking his head and pressing his lips together in a show of self-control.

“Nothing.” He straightens, saber hilt firm in his hand. “We need to go.”

He wrenches the door out of its frame with the Force and they spill into the corridor, back to back. At each end of it, a wall of stormtroopers awaits them. Blocking them in.

Rey frantically searches for another route. Above, or below—there has to be another way. She didn’t come all this way just to die here with him…

Kylo is tugging one of his gloves off. “Do you trust me?” he asks quietly. The stormtroopers begin their advance, and Kylo twirls the blade in warning, even as he reaches out for her with his ungloved hand.

“I—yes!” She takes his hand without waiting for his explanation.

The Force stirs again, swelling up through Rey where their hands are connected, like a wave building out in the ocean. It surges higher, drawn up through her body, and her breath catches because she can’t—she’s not controlling this—it’s—

Kylo makes a stabbing motion with the saber, and all the white-armored troopers clatter to the ground like a pile of bones.

“Let’s go.” 

He doesn’t release her hand as he pulls her along, through the fallen troopers—unconscious, but not dead. “What was that?” she asks.

“I combined our Force abilities,” he explains, leading her down a fork in the corridor. It’s a sprint for her, though probably not his fastest pace.

“I didn’t know we could do that,” she replies breathlessly.

He pauses a moment before responding, and there’s a note of humor in his voice when he responds. “Neither did I. I wasn’t sure until I tried it.”

More stormtroopers are following them, and it’s a frantic rush, returning blaster fire while they run between the shelter of bulkheads. Rey yelps in excitement when she manages to deflect a blaster bolt with the Force, and Kylo squeezes her hand before charging out to take down another pair of troopers blocking their path.

“Almost there,” Kylo tells her as a massive pair of doors come into sight. All it would take is one last sprint, but of course this is where the First Order have concentrated their soldiers. Rey wonders if they know yet—that their Supreme Leader is gone, the puppet’s strings cut and his master reduced to dust. Dead at the hands of his own weapon.

One trooper marches and plants themselves right in front of the doors. The figure is tall, as tall as Kylo, and their armor is the shiniest chromium Rey has ever seen. 

Kylo grunts a curse next to her. “Stay here.”

He launches himself into the center of the corridor, blade already out, and the trooper swings a baton to meet it. The baton sizzles with twin cyan plasma blades.

“Another traitor!” the trooper yells in a cut-glass accent as she parries Kylo’s saber blows. “A shame you’ll be dead before you can watch the Supreme Leader wipe out the Resistance in its entirety.”

“Haven’t you heard, Phasma?” Kylo responds, and he almost sounds bored. He slams his blade so hard against the baton that it’s shoved backwards into the trooper’s chest. “The. Supreme. Leader. Is. Dead.”

Rey doesn’t understand what happens next. Kylo has the trooper—Phasma—cornered. His next stroke should have finished her. Instead, he’s lurching backwards, the saber hilt held loosely as he reaches up to grasp at his head. His face isn’t contorted in pain. Instead he looks disoriented, adrift from the world around him.

It’s not a feint. Whatever’s going on, Rey knows instinctively that isn’t a lure on Kylo’s part. He never resorts to trickery in a fight; for him, it’s about strength and skill.

Phasma doesn’t hesitate. She pulls her arm back to take another swing at Kylo, and there’s nothing stopping her from striking true.

“Ben!” Rey screams, darting forwards. His saber flies into her hand once more, and she blocks the blow with enough force that it makes her teeth rattle.

If Phasma is alarmed at having to face two of them, she doesn’t show it. She should be at a disadvantage, but Rey is trying to protect Kylo as well as fending for herself. It makes her sloppy, and she’s out of practice with the saber—her muscle memory isn’t there, even if she’s able to draw on what she pulled from Kylo’s mind.

She takes a few steps backwards to lure Phasma away from Kylo, then a few more—only to find she’s pinned up against the wall with no room to maneuver or get any momentum behind her strokes. She goes for the blaster instead, firing off a few shots before realizing they’re useless against Phasma’s armor. One ricochets and hits the wall next to her, spraying ferrocrete across both of them.

Phasma swings the baton towards Rey’s neck, and the plasma blades land inches away from biting into Rey’s skin. All Rey can do is hold the saber against it, pushing back as red meets blue, spitting angry heat. Even with the Force to help Rey, Phasma is stronger, the baton arcs creeping closer and closer.

Rey cries out, and Kylo’s head snaps up. He unclenches his fist, indicating she should pass the saber to him, but there’s no way of getting it past Phasma—the angle’s all wrong. And the moment Rey throws it, it will leave her open and unguarded, at the mercy of Phasma’s baton.

Unless.

It’s a matter of timing. Of concentrating, emptying her mind as best she can and digging down until she finds the bond. Takes hold of it with the Force until she can feel him like she’s actually touching him, like Phasma isn’t standing between them about to decapitate Rey. 

One. Two. Three.

Kylo nods.

Rey drops.

The saber passes from her to him through the bond, and he slices into Phasma from behind.

As two halves of the trooper fall to the ground, Rey scrambles away, using the wall to guide herself back to her feet. Kylo is already reaching for her hand, tugging her through the doors into the hangar bay.

It’s huge, lines of TIE fighters anchored in tiers around the space, ready for deployment. Kylo’s gleaming Silencer holds prime position in the center of the floor.

They’re greeted with a barrage of blaster fire, but it’s as simple as breathing to knock the waiting stormtroopers down this time. Rey and Kylo sprint across the open floor without being accosted, clambering up the entry ramp into the Silencer before a fresh round of troopers can come for them. 

The next few minutes are a flurry of activity: Kylo is concentrating on getting them off the ground, into the air, and away from any TIEs which might follow them. Rey, for once in her life—and she does tell him it will only be the once—obeys the orders he throws her way to make it all happen.

Then Starkiller Base is below them, a rapidly diminishing swirl of white and green. And red—there’s a stripe of fire burning its way through the base.

“What’s that?” Kylo asks, pausing his instructions.

“Oh. I may have reconfigured the cannon to self-destruct.”

He stares downwards, taking it in. “I think that will destroy the entire base.”

“That was the plan.”

"On top of everything else?" he asks absently, but his eyes are warm, delighted.

“Kylo.” She wants to say Ben again, but it’s still too soon. “After we destroyed Exegol, and when you were fighting Phasma—what was that?”

He reaches for her, tugging her down into the pilot’s chair with him. There’s barely room for him but he manages to tuck her in with him, curled into the front of his body. “An adjustment, that’s all.”

It’s her turn to cup his face, to let him see how concerned she is. “Adjusting to what?”

He smiles, but it’s tired, dazed. “All my life I’ve heard voices, talking to me, telling me what I should do. And now they’re all gone.”

“Palpatine,” she murmurs, tracing the contours of his cheek. He has dimples here, so deep, and she’s rarely seen them.

“Yes.” His jaw shifts, clenching and releasing, as he thinks about it. “I have to get used to the spaces where they were.”

“Does it hurt?”

“No.” As he shakes his head, he leans into her touch. “No. I’ve never hurt less. And with the quiet—” This time when he smiles, it’s for real, the dimples appearing and shattering the shell of Kylo Ren. “—With the quiet, all I feel is you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hopefully will update next Monday again (24/02/20) but if I don't it's because other commitments have got in the way and the chapter is on its way ASAP. In the meantime, I'll share a teaser on my Tumblr (link in profile) on Friday.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm a day late! But I've upped the chapter count because this got looooong. We're not even really at the stuff that was meant to go in part 3.
> 
> Thanks again to my beta Reylonging, who helped me wrestle this chapter into some sort of shape when it really didn't want to obey me.
> 
> I love all of your comments and I'm glad it seems to be soothing some post-TROS anxiety.

Rey tries to let the moment of peace last. It’s astonishing to be in Kylo’s arms like this, completely encircled from behind and hugged tight to his chest. He’s buried his face in her neck and all she can do is lean back into him, letting the adrenaline ebb and her breathing calm. Relief pours through the bond and she shares the feeling.

“I wasn’t sure it would work,” he murmurs into her hair. “I thought Snoke would be too strong—but  _ you _ were stronger.”

It wasn’t Snoke. It was never Snoke, and he knows that, but understanding it is another thing entirely when he’s spent years being twisted this way and that by Palpatine’s creation. 

“That wasn’t me,” she replies. “If you hadn’t chosen  _ me _ —”

She’s not going to lie and tell him she knew he would. She’d hated those seconds in the control room before he’d rejected Snoke, when she hadn’t known if Kylo’s master was too far under his skin. And though Kylo  _ had _ chosen her, she’s still worried, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Despite the setbacks in their chaotic plan, this moment of contentment is one she doesn’t really know what to do with. She’s too used to good moments coming with a sting in their tale.

“Why wouldn’t I choose you?” he says, interrupting her thoughts. “You came back in time for me. You’re stronger than Snoke could ever dream of being, yet you put all that power into saving me.” There’s more than a little awe in his voice. “We won, and he can’t take you away from me. I get to belong to you instead.”

“You don’t belong to me,” she’s quick to correct. “Not like that.”

He makes a little noise of discontent in his throat. “Maybe I want to.” He tucks her head under his chin. “And when we get where we need to go, we will legally belong to each other. You promised.”

She’s a little taken aback by how insistent he sounds. He’d had one condition when they’d been coming up with their plan on Starkiller base, a condition she’d happily agreed to because it seemed so minor. They’re already bound together by the Force; everything else seems insignificant in comparison.

Still. He’s right. She  _ did _ promise.

“I know. And I’m not going anywhere. I like it here.” She pats him on the arm to demonstrate what she means, covering his hand with her own.

The Silencer should have jumped to lightspeed as soon as they were out of Starkiller’s atmosphere, but instead she and Kylo seem compelled to watch the fire bloom across the planet’s surface, consuming the base and swallowing the white-capped forests.

No ships follow them, and there’s no evidence of a scrambled evacuation. That means the stormtroopers—Finn’s comrades only a day ago, kidnapped and brainwashed children down to the last one—will all die when the planet implodes. 

She set this in motion. She should witness it. But it’s not like the Hosnian system, even though they’re so much closer to the deaths here—instead of an eruption of fear and pain, Rey only feels the occasional pinprick of a light being wiped from the Force.

When she dips into Kylo’s head she realizes it’s because he’s shielding her from the worst of it.

“Ben!” she protests, turning to press her forehead against his. “You don’t have to do that.”

“I do.” His hand comes to rest on the back of her neck. “You didn’t think through what you were doing when you set the self-destruct in motion. Let me take this burden.”

His mouth is on hers, nipping and teasing and trying to distract her. She knows exactly what he’s doing, but though kissing is a lot more intoxicating than she ever thought it would be, it seems almost sour on her tongue. People are dying on the planet below them, people who never had a real choice in whether to fight for the First Order, and she can’t sit here losing herself in Kylo while that happens.

Instead she braces her hands on his chest and puts a few inches between them. She doesn’t miss the way his eyebrows draw together in confusion as he chases her mouth, but she holds firm, shaking her head. 

His lips part to say something, but the Silencer’s console chimes an alert. They pull apart, veering from the drugged lull of each other’s presence and bracing for danger. The ship is warning them another vessel has fallen out of lightspeed nearby. It’s time for them to go; if the Resistance have arrived to finish off the base, they don’t want to be mistaken for an enemy fighter.

Kylo reaches around Rey to punch in destination coordinates and it’s clear she’s only getting in his way. She tries to wriggle out of his lap and finds herself clamped in place by the arm around her waist.

“Mmm—no,” Kylo hums into her neck. “You stay here.”

She snuggles in closer instead. He at least feels like life, bright and brimming over, compared to the chaos down below. Feeling his life force pulse through him and through their bond is a reassuring balm to everything else.

She’s never touched anyone as much as she’s touched Kylo in the last few hours, and she thinks that might be mutual. It’s not like she ever felt like she was missing anything in particular, even on the coldest of nights when she screwed her eyes shut and hoped for her parents to return, but she didn’t understand what it was like. Sharing body heat, the reassuring weight of somebody else’s torso pressed against your own, being able to feel the mechanics of another person breathing beside you—it’s strange that she enjoys these details of his presence.

“Where are we going?” she asks. The entry into lightspeed is smooth, a disconcerting contrast to the shuddering jolt of experiencing it in the Falcon. The reminder of the other ship niggles at her.

“You’ll see.” The words should be teasing, but he’s as intent as ever. His gaze moving between her eyes and her lips; what he wants is clear. “We’ll be on autopilot for a while.”

She should keep her mouth shut. Or at least press it against his so she can’t say what she’s about to say.

“I want to send a message to somebody,” she blurts.

The way he goes tense against her makes it clear she doesn’t need to tell him who the message is for—but she needs him to understand  _ why _ . She’s ready to explain, ready to plead with him, when he responds.

“We have a deal,” Kylo says slowly. Coldly. His version of a frown is hard to read if you don’t know his face well, but Rey does, so she understands the way his lips press together and the muscles around his eyes twitch. “Do you intend to break it and return to the Resistance?”

“What? No!” She twists in his lap to get a better look at him.

“Then what? I won’t go to them. I haven’t turned to the Light.”

“I know that,” she reassures him. “I just need Finn to know I’m safe. He’s on his way across the galaxy to save me.”

Mentioning Finn is the wrong thing to do. “Why should that traitor need to know that?” Kylo’s nostrils flare, his jaw clenching but the volume of his voice doesn’t increase. It’s better than she expected, and she almost shows her approval with a comforting touch. Instead—instead she realizes she needs to make it clear to Kylo where her boundaries lie.

She’s watched him die. She’s watched him turn for her. The bond between them demands that she soothes him and makes this right. Yet—should she? Is that a good thing? He’s still caught somewhere between light and dark, with his instincts veering closer to the selfish and destructive choices than the man who’d died in her arms. Maybe she’ll never get that version of Ben back, but she definitely won’t if she always gives into his flares of anger.

“You’re not allowed to hate him,” she tells Kylo firmly. “He’s my friend and he cared about me before anybody else. He’s a good man.” She crosses her arms. “And I’m running away with you, you kriffing idiot.”

He doesn’t relax, but he does give a terse nod. His grip on her tightens and she can feel the flicker of possessive anger through the bond, like a white-hot lick of heat. 

And because she can’t leave the wound unpoked, she presses on. “Don’t you want your parents to know you’re safe?”

He lets out a guttural noise of annoyance and she’s almost dislodged from his lap. But the surge of emotion allows a scattered thought to cross the bond between them, the ragged edge of concern that makes her want to reassure him. Kylo is  _ afraid _ . Afraid of facing his father, knowing that in another life, right now he’s preparing to kill Han. The possibility of reconciliation will be cut short on the blistering crossblades of his saber. And yet, that prospect seems easier than ever having to actually speak to him. A galaxy where Han Solo is still hurtling around in the Falcon is one full of opportunities to cross paths with him, and Kylo isn’t sure he likes that idea.

Aware that Rey has latched onto his thoughts, Kylo thrusts her out in a panic. She lets him, backing away mentally and mollifying him with her words. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to.” She tucks a stray lock of hair behind his ear. “I’m not sure if I’ll ever get used to that.”

Kylo swallows. “We should.” His nostrils flare, and she can see him struggling to let his guard down again and throw his mental shields wide open for her. “If we’re going to be everything we’re meant to be.”

She rewards him for that thought with a smile.

By the time they drop out of hyperspace, Kylo has eased. “You can send a message,” he agrees. “Tell them I’m alive if you want to. It doesn’t matter to me.” It’s a lie, and they both know it—he wants desperately for his parents to care, and nothing Rey says will convince him they do. Only time and real evidence will.

The Silencer’s console is simple enough to use despite its many dizzying options. She inputs the Falcon’s details into the comlink portal and waits for it to connect.

It’s when the screen above the console flares to life that Rey realizes she might have selected the wrong option. This isn’t just an ordinary comlink—this is a holocomm. And right now, Han Solo’s face is being projected into the cabin of the Silencer.

Kylo has gone very, very still beneath her.

“Rey?” Han asks in astonishment. “Is that you?” He looks over his shoulder at someone off screen and mutters, “I still haven’t got to grips with this thing.” Chewie rumbles in response.

“It’s me,” she assures him. “I’m safe!”

“You got off Starkiller?” Han peers at Rey as she nods in answer to his question. “Who’s that with you, kid?”

Rey thinks Kylo might be about to crack the arms of the pilot’s seat, he’s gripping them so tightly.

“Um—” There’s no easy way to say it, but Han’s eyes light up with recognition before she can reply.

“Ben! Ben, is that you? Rey, are you with Ben?”

There is a distinct creak of plastoid between Kylo’s fingers.

“It is,” Rey assures Han. “We both made it. I wish I could tell you the full story, but we don’t have time.”

“Tell me where you are, and I’ll come meet you.”

“ _ No,” _ Kylo protests, rough and vehement.

Han’s expression drops, but he’s interrupted by a newcomer to the comlink.

“Rey!” A delighted Finn dashes into whatever space the holocomm is transmitting from. “I thought you died. We were coming to save you, but by the time we got to Starkiller it was already destroyed.”

“That was us!” Rey tells him.

Finn narrows his eyes. “Wait is that—is that him?” He turns to Han. “Why is she sat on him like that?”

“I don’t know…” Han rubs the back of his neck, muttering, “maybe there’s only one seat on his ship?”

“Rey, are you in danger? Is he holding you prisoner still?”

Kylo growls—actually growls—in her ear, his hand reaching out to switch the comms unit off, but Rey bats it away. 

“I’m fine,” she tells them both. “We’re getting married and—”

“What?” Han and Finn say in unison, with very different expressions.

“I’m coming to find you, kid,” Han continues, and this time Rey suspects that’s aimed more at Kylo than herself, but the unit goes silent before she can respond.

The silence stretches on for a long minute before she turns to Kylo, who is currently grinding his teeth together so hard she fears they may crack too. “Do you think he will find us?” 

“Nobody can find us. This ship can’t be traced at all.” But he doesn’t seem convinced by his own words, and for the first time since leaving the interrogation room, he seems uncertain. She almost expects him to abandon their current trajectory and pick a new destination. “Why did you tell him that?”

She’s dumbfounded that he seems...angry about it. “You made it a condition of helping me.”

“I did.”

“So that’s why I said it. Because we are.”

“It’s—that’s private.”

“Is it meant to be a secret? Marriages weren’t secret on Jakku.” Marriages hadn’t been much of anything on Jakku, which is why she’d been surprised he was so insistent about it. Stars, he’d even had to explain to her what a wedding was, because she’d never heard of such a thing. Spending the day signing a contractual agreement didn’t sound very important to her, but he’d assured her that it was legally necessary. It’s not like she’s against the idea, but they’re already bound to each other in the Force, so his adamance doesn’t make much sense to her.

“No, I just—I don’t want to involve  _ them _ in it.”

None of this has enlightened Rey at all. They’d find out eventually—what bewilders her further is the way Han had lit up at the news. “Then it doesn’t matter if they can’t find us.”

She runs a thumbs across his cheek, hoping the tension in his jaw will ease, and Kylo relaxes into her touch.

Things went better in this reality than her own, though she was taken aback by Han not recognizing his own son. How long had it been since they’d seen each other? Or maybe it had just been a bad connection—holocomms are expensive, and she’s sure the one on the Falcon fell off the back of a speeder rather than being bought through legitimate channels.

Kylo begins the landing process and Rey reluctantly removes herself from his lap; she’s a hindrance when he’s trying to land, no matter how much he tries to keep her in place. She curls up in the other chair, gazing out as their destination comes into view.

It’s a small planet, swirling green and blue, and she gasps as she takes in the stretches of ocean and forest. 

“Where are we?” she asks.

“Chandrila.” He pauses. “Do you like it?”

“It’s perfect. Beautiful.”

She catches the corners of his mouth twitching with pleasure at the idea of pleasing her.

They come into land over a body of water, its surface calmer than the sea on Ahch-To, its blue brighter and less moody. She’s surprised to notice the landing platform is on the edge of a settlement—not a city, but somewhere bigger than Niima Outpost. She’d half expected them to go somewhere deserted, and she says as much to Kylo.

“We won’t be here long,” he says. “And the fight between the Resistance and what’s left of the First Order shouldn’t affect here.” Even so, once they’ve landed he strips off the layers of his armor, bundling it all into his cape to throw over his shoulder. “We don’t want to be too conspicuous. Not if they are looking for First Order officers.”

Rey can only nod. He’s been left in his black undershirt, with no scar and with his hair all tousled from their earlier fights—

“What?” he asks as she reaches out a hand towards his abdomen. He looks so familiar like this, yet there’s a stillness to him that marks him as different. That, and there’s no hole in his shirt. “Are you—why are you crying?”

“I’m not!” she insists, even as she blinks back the looming tears. His panic is oddly endearing. She lets her hand come to rest on his torso, where there had been a hole in the cloth in another version of reality. “You just remind me of…well,  _ you _ . Before you died.”

He straightens up at the idea. “I’m here,” he reminds her. “I’m alive.” And as if he’s sifting through her memories, he finds the right thing to say. “You’re not alone.”

It’s not delivered with any of the gravity it had been when she’d heard it in her other life, but with a lighter tone, a twist of his lips that suggests he’s trying to be playful. It wrings a giggle from Rey, and she’s so shocked at the sound that she covers her mouth with her hand. Kylo tugs her fingers away and in the most astonishing twist of all, his face splits into a grin.

All the air leaves her lungs. Ben Solo is smiling at her.

She can’t help returning it, even if she is definitely shedding tears now. 

“He had scars, didn’t he?” Kylo asks. “Ones you’d given him.” She nods, and he continues. “I think—I think he was probably proud of you marking him. Even though you beat him, it didn’t matter because the scars you left meant you existed and you were worthy of pursuing.”

She reaches up to trace a finger across his face, down the path where his scar had once been. “I prefer it this way. It means we’ve never fought one another.”

He turns his head to nip at her finger. “I wouldn’t mind you marking me.”

“No, I like you unblemished.”

He grins again. “I have other scars—some you’ve seen, some you just haven’t yet.”

_ Stars. _ She feels her cheeks burn up as he stalks away down the exit ramp and out onto the planet’s surface.

* * *

The air outside the hangar is fresh and salty. It reminds her of Ahch-To, though the rest of this settlement could not be more different. Instead of Ahch-To’s isolation, steep peaks and pillars of rock, the little town is bustling and is built on flat ground alongside a beach. Everyone they’ve seen so far has been friendly, offering Rey a smile which she returns without hesitation, even if Kylo’s scowl has led people to flinch away.

One thing she hadn’t expected was for him to grab her hand when they left the hangar, stealing a glance at her sideways to measure her reaction. She’d only squeezed his hand in return, liking how big and warm his was around hers, softer and less calloused than her own.

“So what’s the plan?” she asks as they head towards the center of the town. The main street is lined with shops and stalls selling all kinds of things—food and ship parts, antique books and flowers. 

“Bouquet for your lovely lady there, sir?” one of the stallholders cuts in before Kylo can reply, holding out a giant pink flower as big as Rey’s face. “These nova lilies are fresh in.”

Rey couldn’t imagine spending credits on something as frivolous as flowers, even if they were beautiful: blossoms as big as her hands in every color of the rainbow, bunched together in easy to carry bundles. She could smell their perfume from yards away, sweet and heady, and it all made her smile despite the fact the flowers would inevitably wither and fade within a few days. Kylo casts a questioning look her way, and she gives a shake of her head. They’re pretty, but not enough to tempt her to waste money on, no matter how much they make her smile.

No, what she’s really interested in is the food. She’s already started salivating at the other smells in the air, spices she couldn’t even name making her belly rumble. She’s spent her life living off of rehydrated portions and Resistance rations, and the stall with a mound of fruit is more enticing than anything she’s ever seen. She doesn’t know where to turn, the cart across the street advertising roast tip-yip and crab stew.

Kylo notices where her attention has been drawn. “You’re hungry?” He tugs her across to the cart before she can answer, frowning up at the menu. “Order whatever you’d like.”

“Um—” She chews her lip, not even sure where to start. “What’s good?” she asks the round-faced woman behind the counter.

Two minutes later, Rey’s walking away with an armful of stacked containers while Kylo follows her with a pile of napkins. They find a bench overlooking the water and settle down to eat. At least she does—Kylo picks at a few things while Rey gorges herself. He seems content to watch her as she moans her way through what they bought, occasionally offering her a napkin to clean herself down with. She’s never eaten anything with such a range of textures and flavors and she likes all of it—even the bottle of water he offers her, which is less stale and metallic than what she’d been used to on Jakku.

“We’re here to pick up supplies,” he eventually tells her, replying to her earlier question. “And we need to make an appointment. I hope we won’t be here long, but it depends on when they can fit us in.”

“For the wedding. Right,” Rey says around a mouthful of fish fritter, before a thought occurs to her. “No mind tricks!” she warns him.

His eyes darken. “I’ve no intention of waiting longer than I need to.”

She rolls her eyes and scoops up some of the stew on a shroomchip. 

If Rey is concerned about how they’re going to pay for supplies, she needn’t be. There’s no need for either of them to resort to mind tricks when Kylo apparently has a bottomless supply of credits, which he spends first on a two-seated speeder, before letting Rey loose on the food market in the central town square. He lets her buy whatever she wants, fruits and vegetables piled into bags alongside spices and fresh fish, all of it neatly fitting into a refrigerated container on the back of the speeder. And best of all, she even finds a couple of second-hand datapads loaded with recipes and instructions on how to cook.

“Where to next?” she asks when it’s all packed in. 

He guides her onto the rear seat of the speeder while he takes the front one, with the steering controls. Rey’s not entirely sure what to do with her hands, resting them on her own thighs until they’re in motion and realizing she needs to grip onto something to keep her balance.

That something happens to be Kylo’s waist. If he minds, he doesn’t say anything, though she feels his torso shift under her touch. She ends up leaning into him, resting her head against his back, loose enough that they shift together every time the speeder takes a corner.

They don’t go far, and when he parks up in front of another row of stores he springs down to offer his hand in helping her from her seat. It makes her blush, and he doesn’t let go of her hand when she’s stood next to him, leading her into the nearest shop instead.

It turns out to sell clothes, something Rey has no idea where to start with. Kylo confidently asks the assistant to bring out anything they have in his size in dark colors. Rey’s more interested in the hum of the droids in the back room who are stitching pieces together, than the rows of garments surrounding her.

“Buy whatever you like,” Kylo tells her, as if that helps. The amount of choice in here is bewildering, when she’s always been in some variation of wraps and leggings. Plus it’s all so shiny and new, soft and clean, making her aware of how dirty and worn what she’s wearing is. Maybe that’s why the assistant looks at her through narrowed eyes when she returns with a pile of items for Kylo. 

“I don’t need anything,” Rey insists to him.

“You can’t wear that all the time.”

“Why not?” She’s forgotten that Kylo is fussy, the part of him that is Leia’s son coming out sometimes in ways he probably doesn’t even realize. “I usually do.”

“But you don’t need to anymore. And you do need something new to wear for the wedding.”

“Fine,” she agrees on a heavy sigh. New clothes for one day seems like a waste to her, but it was one of those details he’s placing a lot of importance on.

Kylo steps into a changing booth and Rey wanders among the racks. She doesn’t want anything fancy. There’s no telling if they’ll have to fight and run at any point in the future, so she wants practical items. Things she can move in, and things that will be easy to keep clean. There are dresses here, things that drape to the ankles and sparkle from the beads stitched onto them, and though they are lovely to look at she can’t imagine them being very functional.

Rey hesitantly reaches out to touch one, only to be interrupted by a throat being cleared. When she looks to her side, the assistant is hovering there with a heavy, censorious frown.

“Can I help you?” the assistant asks, and her fingers twitch with the urge to bat Rey’s hands away from the fabric. Rey lets her hands drop to her side, suddenly aware of all the grime on them.

“Ah—no.”

“If you aren’t going to purchase anything, maybe you should wait for your master outside.”

Rey can feel her cheeks heating up and she takes a step towards the door because she  _ would  _ feel more comfortable out there.

The door to the booth swishes open and Kylo steps out, an unfastened tunic framing his chest. Rey feels her mouth go dry at the sight of his pale skin and smooth, taut muscles, and the way the assistant is gaping suggests a half-naked Kylo is having the same effect on her.

Or maybe it’s the ferocious look on his face that’s making the assistant go weak at the knees.

“I’m not her master,” he snarls. “She is my  _ betrothed _ . And we intend to spend plenty of credits here today—unless you think we’d be better going elsewhere?”

Rey’s eyebrows shoot up towards her hairline at the word betrothed—has anybody ever used that outside of cheesy romantic holovids?—and the assistant starts babbling apologies.

“Ever so sorry, my mistake—of course, we have plenty of options available, what would the lady like to see?”

The assistant being helpful is actually worse, somehow. Rey finds herself being shown every dress in the shop. It’s only when the assistant realizes that Rey likes the silhouette she’s already wearing that she manages to bring out a selection of legging and tunics, as well as a handful of dresses.

“Not white,” Rey dismisses out of hand. It’s too difficult to keep clean, and it sends all the wrong messages. She’d worn it that year after Crait, as if to prove to herself that she was committed to the Light, and it had taken her too long to figure out that her streak of darkness is nothing to be afraid of. 

Everything she picks is gray and cream. Different shades of it, but that only seems practical to her. And she has chosen a dress, one the assistant insists Kylo remains in the changing booth while Rey tries it on so he doesn’t see her in it. Something to do with bad luck, which makes Rey scoff.

But it doesn’t stop her going along with it. She’s not going to risk any bad luck, and Kylo is the only one who understands how weddings actually work. Maybe there’s more to it than she realizes.

With their new clothes paid for, they head back to the speeder, only for Kylo’s attention to be caught by the display in another window. Rey finds herself trotting along after him, given he’s taken her hand once more, almost colliding with him when he comes to an abrupt stop. 

She gasps.

She’s never seen so much stuff in one place. Precious metals and jewels, neatly arranged so that chains dangle down to display the pendants that hang from them and the other pieces are clustered together by pattern and color. It all glitters and shimmers like it’s normal to have this many precious items in one place. Any single item here would have fed Rey for an entire year on Jakku.

And Kylo is looking at all of it like it smells bad.

“No, this won’t do,” he mutters, before sighing. “I can’t believe…”

“What?”

“Doesn’t matter.” He shakes his head. “Come on. I should show you where we’re sleeping.”

“Don’t we still need to make an appointment?”

He helps her onto the speeder again, and it’s ridiculous, she’s perfectly capable of climbing up herself, but she finds she likes the way he guides her into her seat.

“Change of plans,” he tells her, and when the engine kicks in, it’s too loud to keep asking him questions over.

They take the road out of town, following the waterline, which the roads hugs. Kylo seems to know exactly where he’s going, and she’s struck by how well he’d seemed to know his way around the town too. There are still plenty of signs of life, with piers jutting out into the water and boats moored at them, and residential buildings lining the road facing out to the ocean. It’s one of these buildings that Kylo pulls the speeder to a stop outside, typing a code into a security pad next to a gateway in front of it. The gate swings open and they pass through into an enclosed yard, where he cuts the speeder’s engine.

Rey stares up at the building. It’s three storeys high and painted eggshell blue, though the paint is faded and peeling in some places. The windows have shutters across them and there are weeds growing wild in the yard.

“What is this place?” she asks.

“My mother owns it.” His mouth presses together tightly and he enters another code to let the door swing open.

She’s left gaping at him as he retrieves everything they bought from the back of the speeder, stomping inside the house while Rey creeps in behind him. It’s dark and cool, even a little musty, and she wonders how long it’s been since anybody was here. The outside door has led into a corridor and from the room coming off of it, she can see furniture draped under sheets.

Kylo has gone down to a room at the back of the house which Rey vaguely recognizes as a kitchen when she follows him into it. It’s only because she’s seen the appliances in holovids that she can place them, while Kylo shoves the various foods they’d bought into a refrigeration unit which is humming back to life.

He pauses when he comes across the recipe datapads she bought, handing them across to her gently. “You want to learn to cook?”

She shrugs. “I suppose so. I thought it would be nice.”

There’s a warmth in his eyes, a happy twist to his lips. “I’m used to relying on kitchen droids but that  _ would _ be nicer.”

Then whatever has soured his mood returns. She trails after him into another room, where he pulls one of the sheets off a cabinet and starts rummaging around inside it. An old comms unit appears, bulky and dusty, but it whirs to life when he switches it on. He’s frowning the entire time, and Rey hovers in the threshold waiting to see who he’s contacting.

The line crackles, and it takes Rey a moment to recognize it as somebody breathing before they speak. “Who is this?”

She knows that husky voice.

“Mother,” Kylo says stiffly.

There’s a pause—perhaps a hitched breath, this time. “Ben,” Leia murmurs, tentative and elated all at once.

He still tenses at that use of his name—except when it’s Rey herself using it. “Is it safe to assume I’m not being pursued by the Resistance?”

“No. No, of course not. Han told me—you sent the First Order codes to them. Thank you.” 

He shifts uncomfortably. “Don’t. This isn’t what you think it is.”

“I hear you’re getting married.” Leia sounds wistful, yet uncertain.

Kylo clears his throat. “Hence why I’m contacting you.”

“Your father is looking for you. If you send me your coordinates we can—”

“This isn’t an invitation. I’m only asking for a certain family heirloom.”

Silence. 

“Is it on Chandrila?”

“No, Ben. I have it here with me.”

“I would appreciate it if you could courier it to my location.” He’s doing an excellent impression of polite disinterest.

“Courier?”

“I appreciate that the leader of the Resistance doesn’t have the time to deliver personal items at this critical juncture of the war.”

She sighs. “Ben—”

“You know where I am. I’ll be waiting. And if you tell Han, we’ll be gone before he arrives.”

He terminates the link, staring down at the unit for a moment before packing it away again.

“That was harsh,” Rey tells him. She’s leaning against the doorframe with her arms folded. “Even rude.”

He blinks at her as if he’d forgotten she was there. “I didn’t want her getting ideas.”

“Ideas like she might be invited to the wedding?”

“She’ll only try to insert herself into proceedings. We don’t need that.”

He brushes past her back into the corridor, his emotions shuttered away from her.

“So. Is this where you grew up?” Rey asks as she trots after him. He’s heading up the staircase, and she’s curious to see the rest of the house.

His lips press together in a tight line. Again. “No.”

“But you have been here before.” 

“Mostly we lived in Hanna City, but my mother liked having a place on the coast to retreat to.”

“You had…two houses?”

Kylo glances back at her like it’s no big deal. “On Chandrila, yes. My parents own dwellings on other planets too. And I believe my grandmother’s estates on Naboo are intact.”

“I can’t believe you.”

He pauses in the middle of throwing open a pair of shutters. Light spills into the room, which turns out to be a bedroom, although everything is hidden under sheets up here too. “What don’t you believe?”

“This! All of it.” She stretches her arms wide, gesturing at the house. “How many rooms does this place have?”

“Two bedrooms, two ‘freshers. It’s fairly small—”

“Exactly! You think of this as small. You had all this, and somewhere else to live—and parents who are desperate to come find you, but you keep pushing them away…You lost them before. You never had the chance to fix any of this, but now you do and you’re throwing it away!”

It’s the wrong thing to say. Again. Kylo’s face has gone stony, and she fears for the nearby furniture if he decides to start tossing it around.

Instead, his response is careful. Measured. And still full of fury.

“Han Solo didn’t even recognize me earlier today. You, he knew, but me—he had no idea.”

Kylo storms off again, out of the room and up the second flight of stairs. Rey follows with trepidation, wondering where he’s taking her, but it only turns out to be another bedroom. Smaller, and empty except for the bed.

“This used to be my room,” he tells her, gesturing around at the bare space. “I haven’t been here since I was ten years old, and there’s nothing of mine left here. Before I was sent to train with Luke, it was cleared out. The same in Hanna City. My mother decided that if I was going to follow the Jedi rules, then I had to take what I needed with me, and the rest would go. I begged—I cried, I implored her to keep some of my things, but Luke was on her side. It was like I was being cut out of their lives before I even left.”

Rey attempts to speak around the lump in her throat. “And Han?”

“Wasn’t here. He’d gone as soon as the decision was made and he’d figured out he couldn’t talk my mother out of it. Told me he couldn’t stand a big goodbye. That was the last time I ever saw him. Or her. I was with Luke for thirteen years, and his rules mattered more than whatever I wanted. My mother went back to her politics, and Han Solo went back to being Han Solo. All I got was the occasional comm.”

She’s crying now, hot tears rolling down her cheeks and spilling across her lips when she speaks. She can feel his pain, even if he’s outwardly reining in his emotions and narrowing them down to anger.

“They were trying to keep you safe,” she says. “They wanted to protect you from the Dark.”

“ _ They failed! _ ” 

“I know.”

She steps closer to him, unsure if he’s receptive to whatever comfort she can offer him, but he does the strangest thing. He slumps, and when her hands come up to rest against his chest, he rolls down until he can wrap his arms around her shoulders, dragging her into his body. 

“They left me,” he mutters into her hair. “But you won’t.”

“I won’t,” she agrees. Though she still understands what Leia and Han had done, all those years ago. They’d been the wrong choices, perhaps, but they’d done what they could with what they knew. Still, as much as she can rationalize what happened, she finds herself unable to prevent an encroaching shroud of bitterness. Of course it had felt like exile from the perspective of a little boy . As far as he understood, he’d been sent away because of what they thought he was, not for his sake, but for the sake of those around him, and it had only set him on the path towards isolation and darkness anyway. 

Night falls over the house before Kylo releases her. She’ll have to wait until tomorrow to try out her cooking skills. They pick at what foods can be easily heated up before retreating back to the top floor of the house, to Ben’s old room. They take turns using the ‘fresher and Rey changes into some of her new clothes, something loose and comfortable for sleeping.

Kylo is already in the bed when she emerges from the ‘fresher, curled up under the blankets on his side. He seems to take up most of the bed—which makes sense if he last slept in it when he was a child.

He smiles at her, and it’s tinged with melancholy. “You look lovely.” He clears his throat. “The color suits you.”

“Oh. Thank you.” 

“And I like your hair down like that.”

It’s her turn to smile, biting her lip as she tiptoes towards the bed. His eyes widen.

“Where are you—”

“I’m getting in with you. Clearly.”

“We agreed. Not until we’re married.”

This again, Rey thinks, feeling more than a little frustrated with his rules now.

“Ben Solo, if you think I came all this way to sleep apart from you, you are sorely mistaken. Now shift over!”

He’s right—as part of their bargain to destroy the First Order, he’d insisted they waited until after they were married to—what was the word he used?— _ consummate _ it. She thinks it’s a ridiculous idea, but then she’d agreed not realizing there were rules about this sort of thing. On Jakku, people moved in with each other, and that was marriage. Ben expected a ceremony, all legally binding and she’d only figured that out after she’d agreed to it.

Never mind that their souls were bound together. Never mind that she’d used that connection to drag herself back to him. No, he wanted a piece of paper that said she’d agreed to spend her life with him. And until he had that, they could kiss as much as she liked, but that was all.

Rey doesn’t understand it at all. He rejected the Jedi way of life. He rebelled against the First Order. Kylo and Ben alike both resent having rules imposed on them, and yet he’s insisting on something which he’ll only vaguely allude to as the “proper” way to do things. It’s frustrating given what they’d done earlier in the day—the way their bodies had moved against each other on the floor of the interrogation room—and she can feel he’s as wound up as she is.

It’s probably why he’d chosen this room to sleep in, expecting her to decamp to the other bed on her own. Instead she has to try and wedge herself in beside the stupid  _ kriffing _ nerf herder, wiggling around against him just enough to make him regret his conditions for running away with her.

A firm arm around her waist, pinning her in place, soon puts a stop to that.

Not that she’s going to complain about that. Not when he’s warm and solid behind her. Not when she can hear the ocean outside, soft and soothing, in sync with his breathing. 

She’s asleep too soon to complain at all.

* * *

It’s that arm, still slung around her and trapping her in the bed, that stops her from springing up and into battle when she wakes up the next morning.

In the hazy moments between her fleeting dream and proper consciousness, she doesn’t recognize the room, or the bed, or much of anything. And though Ben is so familiar behind her, the bond humming its contentment to her, the fact that she’s never shared a bed with him before has her instincts wired to fight or flee.

As it is, she can’t move, and that means she has to lie there and endure the kisses being bestowed to her bare shoulder.

Maybe  _ endure _ is a harsh word.

“Morning,” she mumbles as the adrenaline ebbs.

The kisses don’t stop, so his reply comes against her skin. “I slept well.” He sounds astonished by it. “You?”

“Mmm,” she responds happily. 

From this angle, in the morning light, she can see a sliver of the ocean through the shutters. It really is peaceful to lie here with its lulling rhythm, watching the waves crest and burst against the shore. 

“You dreamed last night,” Kylo tells her. “Of an island. It was surrounded by water.”

“Ahch-To. You must have seen it in my thoughts yesterday.”

“I did.” He’s thoughtful for a moment. “Luke is there, isn’t he? If you aren’t going to take the Falcon to him, like you did in that timeline, maybe the Resistance will try and find him.”

She has to open herself up to the bond, following its path back to Kylo’s head and dipping into his emotions shallowly to understand what he’s feeling. There’s that stubborn knot of resentment at the forefront, with Luke as its primary target today.

She dips her head to press a kiss to his fingers. “They don’t need him now. We already saved the galaxy.”

Evidently Kylo hasn’t considered this possibility. He makes a noise of surprise, but his thoughts are already shifting back to bitterness. “He’s still there. If anybody does contact him…”

“Then he’ll be as rude and dismissive towards them as he was to me. Trust me, Luke isn’t intending to leave that island. It’s easier to leave him there to stew in his guilt and regret.”

She turns around in Kylo’s arms to face him, and reaches up to trace her fingers across his furrowed brow.

“The Jedi texts are there,” he says. “There’s so much we could learn from them if we could retrieve them.”

Rey snorts. “It’s all in my head, if you want to go looking for it, but trust me when I tell you there’s no enlightenment to be found inside them. They’re full of the same nonsense: light versus dark, peace through no attachments. That can’t be right, or why did the Force bind us together like it did?”

He’s looking at her now like she’s just solved the Theorem of Master Thorpe. “You’re right. Why should we cling to those old ways? We can forge our own path. Surely together we’re the most powerful Force users to have ever existed.”

In his enthusiasm, he’s slightly overshot the point, but given he looks so  _ cute _ when he’s like this—ruffled hair, fervent eyes, his ears peeking out through his dark curls—she can overlook it.

She’s contemplating what the first thing she’s going to eat this morning is, when Kylo’s frown returns. It takes a second until she understands why—there’s an engine on the road outside, moving closer to the house.

In fact, it sounds like it’s come to a stop outside the house. 

“The courier,” Kylo murmurs. It takes some untangling for them to get out of the narrow bed, but they manage it, and Rey follows him down the stairs with her blaster at the ready. He retrieves his own from the kitchen before they approach the main entrance.

“That was fast,” she whispers, tucking herself behind the door before Kylo opens it.

“I’m sure my mother has sent only her most trustworthy person with what I’ve asked for,” he responds, entering the security code to let the door swing open.

“I’m sure she did,” the courier comments, in a familiar throaty voice. “Hello, Ben.”

His blaster drops from his hand with a clatter to the floor. “Mother.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am going to give myself some leeway here and say it might be two weeks before I update, but if it's that long, expect a 10,000 word chapter to wrap this whole thing up.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm back! Eventually. I overshot my predicted date for posting this because it kept growing and growing and growing - however, the final part is written! I'm doing final edits with my beta right now and then will post it in a few hours.
> 
> Thanks to said beta, reylonging, for all her ideas and help in shaping this. And thanks for all your comments on what there is so far!

Leia is heartier than when Rey last saw her, with less gray in her neat braid, more color in her cheeks. Breezy, even if her mouth is pressed in a firm line that may be hiding either a smile or a frown. Suddenly Rey recognizes that expression in her son. She’s never seen the two of them together like this and despite the differences between them, there are so many similarities too: the dark eyes and lustrous hair, but also tics and mannerisms, a purse of the lips or tilt of the chin.

Not that Leia is looking in Rey’s direction. She’s staring up at her son, who towers over her while somehow looking like a timid, wide-eyed toddler. 

“Mother,” he repeats thickly.

“Ben,” she replies. There are tears in her eyes, a stunned air to her as she drinks in the sight of his face. “Look how tall you’ve grown.”

It breaks the spell. Kylo steps backwards, and the shyness disappears, hidden behind a scowl. “I don’t go by that name anymore. And I’ve been this height for fifteen years.”

Leia winces but crosses the threshold anyway, closing the door behind her. She glances around the room, taking in the sheet-clad furniture, before her shrewd gaze falls on Rey. “You must be Rey. Finn has told me so much about you.“ It’s warm, and Rey can’t help smiling in response, even if it’s a shock for her mentor to look at her like a complete stranger. Worse than when Kylo had, in some ways, because Rey spent more time with Leia than she ever did with Ben. But Leia always did have a way of making people like her and feel at ease.

“Why are you here?” Kylo cuts in, the mention of Finn having its usual souring effect on him.

Leia looks up at him sternly. Her hands aren’t on her hips but they might as well be. “Well, let me see. I’ve had an interesting couple of days: the First Order finally makes its move and destroys the Senate, and I’m in the middle of mobilizing a Resistance movement when I get a call from your father on D’Qar saying you’ve destroyed Maz’s place and kidnapped some girl.” She gestures towards Rey and cocks her head. “Which seems to be going well. Our intel says the First Order has made our base its next target, but before our counter-attack can take place, some rock in the Unknown Regions gets vaporized instead, their base is destroyed and you send us all their codes so we can finish them off. Thank you for that, by the way.”

“I didn’t do it for you,” he says sullenly.

Leia rolls her eyes. “Then I get confirmation Snoke is dead and you’ve disappeared, only for your father to tell me you’re actually running away to marry the girl you kidnapped. Finally, I receive a comm from you here asking for your grandmother’s ring and you expected me not to drop everything and come find out what’s going on?”

Kylo’s jaw works as he grinds his teeth together. “Not really. I suppose Han is here too?”

“No.” But Rey recognizes the twitch of a muscle in Leia’s cheek. She’s lying, but Rey doesn’t think Kylo knows that. “When is the wedding?”

“As soon as I can arrange it. Do you have the ring?”

“I’m keeping it somewhere safe,” Leia says, and Rey suppresses a snort. No doubt Han has it. 

“Ah. So you’re only planning to give it to me if I meet your requirements. Is that it? An invitation to the ceremony, is that what you want?”

Leia sighs. “You’ll get the ring. But would it really be so bad, me being there? You’ll need a witness. Both of you will.”

“ _ I _ will?” Rey asks. Not for the first time, she’s reminded of how little she knows about weddings. “Why is this ring so important?”

“It was my mother’s,” Leia tells her. “A symbol of her own marriage.”

“My grandfather gave it to her,” Kylo elaborates. “So I would like to give it to you.”

“Your grandfa—Darth Vader?”

“He was still known as Anakin Skywalker then,” Leia corrects. 

Rey would like to point out that Kylo’s worship of Darth Vader should be consigned to the past, now he knows who was actually in his head all these years. But it’s at this point Rey’s stomach decides to interrupt with a loud, persistent gurgle. Two sets of eerily similar eyes turn to her.

“Excuse us,” Kylo says pointedly to Leia. “We haven’t yet had breakfast since we weren’t expecting visitors.”

Leia waves a hand in the direction of the kitchen. “By all means.”

She follows them in, of course, helping Rey locate the utensils she needs and bemoaning that their kitchen droid is in storage in the main apartment in Hanna City. Something about that makes Kylo freeze up, reverting back to the mantle of a sulky little boy, and Rey has questions about it for later.

Now is not the time to start teaching herself to cook, so she falls back on an old standard she’d learned on Ajan Kloss: omelets. They have a few different types of eggs in the chiller and she scrambles them together before pouring them into the pan with a selection of herbs and spices they’d bought the days before. She also dices up Riding Ham to add to the mix. A heavy silence lies over the room while she works, until she piles a couple of plates high with the omelets and lays them down on the small table that Kylo has set. 

Leia cleans up while they work through the stack. It’s strange to see the general doing something so domestic, and Kylo studiously stares down at his plate rather than watching his mother move around the room. He eats primly, using both a knife and fork, chewing and swallowing each mouthful deliberately. Rey is not above eating a rolled up omelet with her hands, or spearing the entire thing onto her fork and shoveling it into her mouth in one go, but instead she tries to pretend she has, at some point in her life, been taught table manners. 

Her stomach is not impressed, but slowing down allows her to actually appreciate that the food tastes of something: earthy, salty, and peppery, with notes of heat and richness from the ham. From the glances Ben keeps giving her, she thinks he likes the omelets too. The thought of maybe being good at this sends a flicker of warmth through her.

She still finishes eating before he does, and Leia swoops down to retrieve her empty plate and start a conversation. 

“Finn was worried sick about you when you were taken from Takodana.” This earns a growl and a glare from Kylo. “You made quite the impression on him in a short space of time. And Han.”

Leia’s sideways glance at her son makes it clear she knows that the person Rey’s made the biggest impression on is Kylo himself.

“Please, tell me about yourself,” Leia prompts.

“Mother…”

But Rey hushes him, skipping through a summary of her life. The life she’s lived in this world, so far, not the one where everybody she loved died before she dragged herself back through time. That can wait.

“I think the Force brought us together,” she sums up, trying to explain to Leia exactly how she had persuaded Kylo to defect with her. 

Leia’s too astute not to notice the gaps in her story, and Rey can see the questions piling up on the tip of her tongue. Instead, Rey decides to deflect her with questions of her own.

“You said that the ring Kylo asked you to bring here was a sign of your mother’s marriage. Why is that?”

That leaves both mother and son staring at her blankly, almost like droids whose protocols have just been reset. 

“What do you mean?” Leia asks.

“Well, how can a ring be symbolic of anything? I-I understand the concept of gifts, I suppose, but how can it represent marriage?”

Kylo has finished his food but is still resolutely staring down at his plate, leaving his mother to try and explain.

“Rey, giving your spouse a ring is a fairly common sign of affection throughout the galaxy. Especially in the Core Worlds, to give someone a ring is to give them your heart, but especially a wedding ring. It shows your commitment to the people around you. Does that not happen on Jakku?”

She shakes her head. “Anything with any value would be traded for food or credits. I think the only thing people probably did on Jakku when they got married was share their living quarters and food.”

Kylo is looking at her with a laser-focused stare, and she shifts under his scrutiny. He’s seen what her life was like—is he surprised? Embarrassed that she’s saying this to his mother, the princess and senator? She wants to crawl inside his head to understand but that seems like a rude thing to do in front of Leia.

“I was astonished but happy when Ben asked me for the ring. I never thought he would get married, for various reasons—”

“Like the fact you sent me off to train as a Jedi at age ten,” says Kylo waspishly.

“—But a wedding is such an important, romantic occasion, and even if he doesn’t want me there, I’m glad he found you all the same.” She beams at Rey, resting a hand on her shoulder, and Rey melts at Leia’s happiness. She’s never seen her like this, had only watched her progressively wither under the weight of all her responsibilities and sorrows. Instead that weight has gone and she looks more like the bright-eyed, dynamic leader Rey had seen in old holos.

Of course, she hasn’t missed what Leia’s said about weddings being _ important, romantic occasions _ , and she shoots a bewildered look at Ben across the table. When he’d made her promise to marry him back on Starkiller Base, he’d made it sound so formal and dry, a legal bond between them, proof that she was serious about their partnership.

The way he fidgets under her focus indicates that maybe he’s not been as forthcoming about why he wants to get married as she thought. 

“We should probably get dressed,” Rey says to Leia. “Then we can talk properly.”

“I have nothing more to say,” Kylo says, but hurries to trail after Rey when she heads upstairs rather than being left alone in his mother’s company.

Rey’s ready to launch into a conversation with Kylo when they reach his bedroom, but one look at her face has him hurrying into the ‘fresher and locking the door behind him. When she hears the shower click on, she decides to use the ‘fresher on the floor below rather than wait for him. Even still, she’s clean and dressed and back in the bedroom before he’s finished. Or maybe he’s hoping she’ll go away and he won’t have to talk to her about this. 

No chance.

Why exactly is he so adamant about having a wedding? She thinks she might know the answer—but she needs to hear it from him.

Eventually, Kylo comes padding out in bare feet, his hair damp and his torso covered by a slate-colored sweater that belies all the muscle beneath the fabric. He’s shaved, the dark stubble that had scraped over her shoulder this morning gone. All of Rey’s questions skitter out of her head when he stops in front of her, looking down at her like she’s the last portion in the galaxy.

“I like this color on you,” he says, bending to cover her mouth with his own.

She knows exactly what he’s doing, putting off the conversation, but she also can’t find the will to care. Kissing is a lot more intoxicating than she ever thought it would be, making her thoughts fuzz into an embarrassing tangle. Everything narrows down to how it all feels: the texture of his lips against hers, his skin surprisingly soft beneath her fingers, the coy brush of his tongue.

He deepens the kiss, pulling her flush against him, one arm looping around her hips to lift her up. She yips in surprise, wrapping her arms around his shoulders for support. He’s solid, and warm, and the bond hums between them in pleasure.

He takes a few steps and they stumble down onto the cot, her sprawled out on top of him this time, her legs parting to straddle his hips. She finds the hem of his sweater, hands sliding under it to glide up the smooth skin of his abdomen. He tenses beneath her touch but his mouth only becomes greedier.

It’s when she trails her hand lower between them that he stops. Lifts her off his lap to lie beside him on the cot while he pants and shakes his head.

“It’s not much longer. Hours, really,” he says in response to Rey’s whine of protest. “And my—we have company downstairs.”

That isn’t the bucket of cold water it should be. Nor, apparently, is it to him, not the way he squeezes her behind and drags her close again.

“Then what difference does it make? If we’re getting married soon, what does it even matter?”

He shakes his head and changes the subject. “I like it when you leave your hair down like this,” he murmurs, sliding his fingers into it. 

“You told me that already.”

“It’s still true.”

“Stop trying to distract me.” Even though she really, really likes him distracting her. Especially when his mouth finds the column of her neck, placing teasing kisses and bites in the soft skin of her throat. 

It’s her turn to push him away and when she does, his face settles into a sober mask.

“You didn’t tell me that getting married is meant to be  _ romantic _ ,” she whispers. “I thought it was a legal thing to you—”

“Would it have made any difference?” He studies her as he waits for her answer, eyes as intense as they’ve ever been.

“No. You’re the other half of me and I don’t need a piece of paper to tell me that. But if you do…”

“I do.”

“Why?” She’s shown him  _ everything _ . What more does he need to know how much he means to her?

He flinches and looks away from her. “You’ve walked away from me before. The other me. What’s to stop you from doing that again, if I’m not  _ him _ . And I’m not. I’m not the man who faced Palpatine at your side. I may never be. What if you change your mind?”

“I won’t,” she vows. “I’d rather have any version of you alive than be without you. And what difference does it make anyway? People leave each other even after marriage.”

It’s perhaps the wrong thing to say, given his parents’ tenuous grasp on their own union, but he nods anyway. “I know that. Better than anyone. And yet…I want that commitment from you. I need to hear the words from you. I need to be able to show the world that for once, somebody chose me.”

She reaches up to cup his face in her hands. “I do. I will.”

The connection opens when their eyes meet and she doesn’t so much fall into his thoughts as she does flow into him, like they are two pools of ink being mixed together in a palette. Red and blue becoming a brilliant, vibrant amethyst.

Much like her, he’s never had dreams of getting married because he never thought he would, but since she arrived, there’s a tiny flame in his soul. He’s spinning a reverie in the smoke from this flame, which doesn’t burn but which does generate light and warmth, and there’s a sweetness to the whole notion. She’s never come across anything like it, the way he’s curling his entire being around this flame to protect it and stoke it higher. Tiny smoke figures who hold hands and whisper vows to each other. Rey catches a glimpse of her face, smiling at him, promising to be his everything.

_ The most important day of my life _ , his voice murmurs in this secret space between them. It’s not directed at her, but she’s able to capture it and hold it in her hands anyway, feeling the tentative happiness emanating from the idea.

_ Our lives, _ she corrects him.

Most of his thoughts are harder to grasp than that, silvery wisps that dissipate when she gets too close, but sometimes they brush through her anyway. How tender the idea of somebody loving him is, like gently running a finger over a bruise without pressing down. It could hurt but it doesn’t, yet. How he doesn’t love her, yet, but it’s going to be so easy, and he’s already halfway there. He’s known it since Takodana, when every molecule in his body insisted she belonged to him. With him. All he has to do is trust her and let go—and even if he tried to stop it, he probably couldn’t.

It’s terrifying to him. Terrifying how much he wants it, and how much it will hurt when he loses her. 

Because lose her he must; it’s the way of his life. He’s never been able to keep hold of anything he wanted, and he’s wanted love most of all. Rey is the smoke surrounding that flame inside him, something he cannot capture in his hands no matter how hard he tries. And despite it all he’ll risk burning just to feel warm.

She thinks she’s crying. Doesn’t he know that she’s always felt that too? Even when she hated him, it didn’t do a kriffing thing to stop her from  _ wanting _ him. Leaving him behind on the Supremacy had been the hardest thing she’d ever done, a wound that never healed, because she’d been alone and adrift once more.

_ Don’t.  _ She pushes the command towards him.  _ I’m not smoke. I’m not fire. I’m solid, and real, and I will be wherever you are. _

_ Do you mean it? _

“Kids?” Leia calls from the bottom of the staircase, ripping Rey out of the connection. “Are you done canoodling yet?” There’s a certain amount of delight evident in her voice at the idea.

They’re sitting with their foreheads pressed together, mouths not quite touching. His eyes remain closed as Rey begins to untangle herself from him, which is made difficult by the way he’s wrapped around her, unyielding.

“We can’t hide up here forever,” she tells him.

“Speak for yourself.” The way his lips barely graze hers as he speaks makes her shiver against him.

“If we do, we’ll never get married,” she teases.

Those seem to be the magic words. Her flush has evaporated by the time they’ve descended the stairs, although she still feels like she’s moving in a cocoon of joy, cloaked in soothing purple light. The same cannot apparently be said for Kylo, whose mood drops the further down the house they move, until he’s face to face with his mother again.

He sweeps past Leia, who is sitting in the living room nursing a mug of caf. The shutters are open, the sheets removed from the furniture, and bright ocean sunshine is streaming through the windows. An ancient droid is whirring away at the dust.

“I have arrangements to make,” he says to them both, leaving Leia to call out his name to the door closing behind him. Rey hears the speeder engine turn over outside, and turns to Leia with her arms folded awkwardly.

Leia’s smile is no more confident than Rey feels. “I guess now’s the time to get to know each other.”

* * *

Rey has her own mug of caf, clutched in her hands like a lifeline as she stares out at the foam-kissed waves. She’s finished telling Leia the whole story in halting, muddled bursts, while Leia steered her with apt questions and prompts. She’s not the kind of woman to offer much comfort in the way of affection—something Rey thinks says a lot about who she was as a mother—but she does pat Rey’s hand whenever she falters, giving her the space to cry it through.

Weirdly, Rey feels better for doing so. She’s already shared it with Kylo but that was in a very different way, like reliving it at high-speed while he submerged himself in her memories. Raw and stinging but not in a way she’s had to linger with. Putting it all into words is a different matter entirely, and when she reaches the part where Ben dies, Leia does take Rey into her arms. 

“So much loss,” she says in that smoky voice, stroking Rey’s hair. “You’re a very strong woman. I couldn’t be happier that Ben has you.”

The caf is cold and Rey is in the process of heating it back up on the stove, reluctant to waste it, when she hears Kylo return. She rushes back into the hallway, ready to run interference between him and Leia if she has to, as he strides back through the door.

His eyes are wide, barely concealing the excitement brimming up within him. “Sunset,” he tells her.

“Today?”

He nods, then shutters his emotions when Leia comes to lean against the doorframe. “So soon?” she asks.

“I see no need to wait.” He regards her coolly before continuing. “You were, unfortunately, right about needing witnesses.”

“I know,” Leia replies. “One each.” She doesn’t appear smug about it, only elated that she has a reason to attend.

“One each?” Rey finds herself echoing.

“You both need somebody present who knows and can confirm you are who you say you are,” Leia explains.

“Oh. I don’t have anybody like that.”

Leia offers her a cryptic smile. “I’m sure I can arrange something.”

It’s been a long day already, despite not even being noon. Yet sunset is still hours away, and Rey wants nothing more than to skip through those hours until it’s time to leave this house and go…wherever it is she needs to go. With Ben. She doesn’t care.

Somehow she ends up sequestered with Leia in the other bedroom, putting on the dress she chose yesterday. It’s very simple, a soft, heathery shade of gray that criss-crosses her body like her tunics, falling to her knees and with extra panels of gauze draping down her body. With it she wears a pair of slippers instead of her usual boots. Leia offers her a few items of make-up, though Rey shuns most of it. Kylo’s already seen her face grimy from a fight, what difference would it make?

She ties her hair back simply, half-up like she once had on her journey from Ahch-To, but Leia coaxes her into a chair in front of a mirror.

“Ben seems to want tradition, so I have one I think he’ll like,” she says, pulling the tie from Rey’s hair and shaking it loose. “This comes from my home planet.”

“Alderaan?”

Leia nods. “We had a lot of rules around hair, especially braids.” She smooths Rey’s hair down with her hands, combing it with her fingers. “It was an entire language of its own. I always wanted to teach it to Ben, but he was gone before he was old enough to teach.”

“He was  _ very  _ young when he went to Luke.” Rey doesn’t mean to sound chiding, but no matter how gently she says it, it’s still a rebuke.

Leia’s hands still. “I thought it was for the best.” She’s regretful. Somber. “I couldn’t teach him what he needed to know, and he adored Luke almost as much as he adored Han.”

Rey is suddenly very aware that Kylo is listening—probably on the other side of the closed door. And if he is, this is the perfect time to ensure he hears things he needs to.

“You know he always thought that you sent him away because you didn’t want him around. That he got in the way of your work—that you decided the galaxy needed you more than he did.”

“No,” Leia replies firmly, beginning to twine two strands of Rey’s hair together. “Sending him to Luke was the hardest thing I ever had to do.” Her lips press together in that eerie reminder of Kylo, steeling herself against emotion. “It’s true that I didn’t always understand Ben or know how to handle him. But I knew that if he followed the Jedi path, he’d be cutting himself off from emotional ties and he’d distance himself from me. No mother wants that. I did it because I believed it was for his own good.” She adds a third strand of hair, and the motion is soothing to Rey. “I was wrong.”

Maybe Leia knows that Kylo is listening to them as well.

“Did Luke ever tell you what happened?” Rey asks.

Leia’s hands are trembling, even as she deftly begins to lace a fresh section of hair together. “He told me his version of events.”

“Which was?”

“They fought. Ben destroyed the temple and left, running to Snoke.”

“You know that’s not what happened.”

Leia shakes her head. “I didn’t think so. I assumed Luke was sparing me the worst of it—”

Rey snorts. “Sparing his own ego, more like.”

And as Leia finishes the braid, Rey tells the whole story, at least the one she’d come to understand, as told to her by both men and plucked from Ben’s mind when they’d been connected. Leia’s eyes close, her head bowed and her hands ceasing their work as she hears all about Luke raising his saber over his sleeping nephew, and the destruction that followed. Ben, blindsided by the storm annihilating the temple and his fellow students, chased away by the remaining few until he has nowhere to go except to Snoke.

Leia’s cheeks are wet. “I always wondered why he didn’t come to me. Or Han. I thought he knew I would forgive him anything.”

“Even murder?”

The answering stare in the mirror is fierce. “I’m not perfect. Nobody is. If Luke could forgive Vader at the end of it all, I could have helped my boy.” She takes a deep breath and resumes her work. “I just wish he’d known that.”

“It’s not your fault. It was Snoke. Palpatine. I’m not sure he ever had much of a chance, even if you’d made other choices—they’d have found a way to get to him.”

Leia works in silence for a few more minutes, until she ties off another section and tucks it into the wreath of braids she’s made on Rey’s head. “There you go. An Alderaanian marriage braid.” She hums contentedly as she observes her handiwork. “It suits you.”

“Thank you.”

“I wish I’d had more time. I could have shown you all kinds of ways for you to wear your hair on your honeymoon.”

“Honeymoon?”

“Oh, come on, kid! Please tell me that’s not another tradition that escaped your notice on Jakku?”

It is. Leia chuckles her way through an explanation, leaving Rey bubbling with excitement, although she tries to pretend it’s the idea of traveling the galaxy as newlyweds that’s causing it. And really, a month dedicated to exploring new places for a standard month does seem like a lot of fun. She’s still seen very little of the galaxy except in the midst of a battle or a chase.

But it doesn’t sound nearly as much fun as an entire month of getting to be intimate with Kylo.

The shorter days on Chandrila are a blessing, because the afternoon wanes faster than the morning had. 

“I’d better go sort out the other witness,” Leia says, padding out of the bedroom. “I know Ben gets antsy if he’s away from you for too long, but don’t let him in here, it’s bad luck.”

“I won’t,” Rey promises serenely, knowing that if Kylo comes knocking she has no intention of sending him away. 

Sure enough, as soon as the sound of Leia’s speeder’s engine vanishes out of earshot, the door to the bedroom slides open and Kylo inches his way inside. He looks—feels—a little awestruck, and she doesn’t think it’s got anything to do with what she’s wearing. Instead, it’s a feeling that’s been blossoming ever since she told Leia the truth about the night Kylo left Luke.

He frowns at her hair, crossing the room to loom over her. “I don’t like it.”

“Really?” She reaches up to awkwardly pat at the braids. “I thought you would. It’s traditional, apparently.”

“I know. But Alderaan isn’t in my blood, really.” He urges her to her feet, his fingers sliding into her hair to find the ends. She tips her face upwards, enjoying his deft touch as he begins to unbind Leia’s work. His brows scrunch together in concentration, and for some reason she finds it adorable, pressing a soft kiss to his jaw.

“I know you were listening,” she tells him.

He takes a shaky breath. “Thank you. For telling her about Luke. For believing me.”

“Of course I believe you—I’ve witnessed it.” The braids are completely undone and he runs his fingers through the waves left behind. She leans into his touch as his fingertips stroke across her scalp, soothing the tightness left behind. “That feels really nice.”

He keeps doing it, until he weaves his hand around the back of her neck, tugging at the hair there and keeping her in place while he initiates a kiss.

Not that she resists. This doesn’t feel like bad luck to her at all, the way his mouth moves against hers. She slides her own hands up into his hair, mimicking how he’s holding her. She curls her fist and gives a soft tug, and Kylo lets out a ragged moan into her open mouth.

He strikes like a snake, pulling her flush against him, her feet dangling off the floor so she’s held in place against his chest by the firm arm around her waist. She yelps and tightens her grip, which only seems to elicit a prolonged rumble from his throat, one which reverberates through his ribcage and into hers.

With a few steps, they’re at the wall beside the dresser and he has her pressed to it, hiking up her skirt with his free hand. Then he shifts, letting her legs spread and wrap around his hips, claiming her mouth once more.

His control is a frayed thread, one she can feel through the bond, and when their hips shift together, rolling and grinding until they find a rhythm that works for both of them, the thread snaps. Rey feels it go, feels Kylo surrender to the heat and friction between them. He’s tracing a path up her bare thigh, fingers long enough to wrap around it entirely, his thumb falling in the crease at the very top.

She barely understands the mechanics of what sex is. She’s seen it, raw and animalistic, on Jakku. She’s long figured out how to send herself off to sleep by touching herself between her legs. And she’s known that she’s wanted to do…things with Kylo for as long as she’s known him, even if she lied to herself about it, and even if she had no idea what it was she actually yearned for. She couldn’t put it into words even if she tried. But the blessing of the bond is that he’s able to pluck the knowledge of where she needs to be touched straight from her head—especially the way she’s aching now, crying out mentally for his fingers to  _ move. _

His thumb does first. Only an inch. Only the barest brush over her underwear, but it has her bucking against him, breaking their kiss. 

He rests his forehead against hers, dark gaze burning into hers as he trails his hand up and over her belly, then slips his fingers beneath her underwear, over her mound and down to her wet flesh. His thumb slides to exactly where she needs it to be, two fingers working lower. Their invasion is new, but not unwelcome, thick and solid as they press into her. 

The pressure is strange. A little uncomfortable. But the circles he’s making with his thumb—soft, precise—make it bearable. More than bearable—she melts into his touch, rocking against him in a way which only drives his fingers deeper. He’s not looking at her face anymore, instead watching the way he’s touching her with an intense greed, teeth digging into his lower lip.

She’s building to something, climbing up towards a precipice, and it makes her whine when his fingers disappear, trying to clench down around him and keep him in place. Instead he gives a shaky laugh, fumbling to unlace his pants, shoving aside her underwear so he can push against her  _ just so _ and breach her.

All she can do is wrap her arms around his shoulders and cling onto him.

But his words from earlier—all the times he’s stopped them from getting this far—niggle at her. She doesn’t want him to stop, but has to check anyway.

“Are you sure?” she murmurs in his ear.

He falters for a second, but only a second. “Yes.”

He’s bigger than his fingers, and gravity drives him deep. Rey whimpers, toes curling as she tries to decide whether it feels good or not. It’s a lot. Too much? His thumb is back in place and that helps. That, and the reflection of how she feels to him shimmering through the bond. It’s like he’s molten inside, every shred of anger and resentment inside him lost beneath a feeling of rightness. Pleasure, yes, a heady slide towards a shattering, but also wonder and awe. He never knew anything could feel like this, or that he could be connected to somebody in this way.

His mouth finds hers, moves against it mindlessly as he learns how to thrust his hips in a way that works for both of them. His thumb stutters in its movement as he struggles to concentrate on both things at once, but she likes the faltering rhythm anyway. Not knowing what comes next. Even if it’s only an echo of his pleasure, she’s sliding towards that oblivion with him, each pass of his thumb only pushing her towards the inevitable. 

When she does shatter, she’s not quiet about it, wordless sounds ripping from her throat. It takes her by surprise, somehow, how quickly she falls off the precipice between one breath and the next. Stars burst behind her eyes, air forced from her lungs and for a long, brilliant moment she’s not in her body anymore. She’s somewhere high above, so deeply intertwined with Kylo that they are one being, no end and no beginning, completely seamless and unified. As it should be. His revelation at the way she pulses around him is hers, his wave of euphoria as he spills within her hers too.

As they collapse against the wall together, panting and boneless, it takes a while to separate themselves into different beings once more. 

Kylo is the first one to rouse. Rey’s head is resting on his shoulder but she lifts it when he tenses against her.

_ “Kriff.” _

“Mmm?” She let her head loll back to gaze up at him, unable to control her smile. It’s like she’s got stardust running through her veins right now and she’s pretty sure nothing can ruin this feeling.

“That wasn’t…we were supposed to do that in a bed. It was supposed to be—” He waves a hand in frustration, and she understands what he’s trying to say. He wanted to give her romance. Even though he still wears the mantle of Kylo, there are things he clings to. Being wanted and connected to somebody else in ways Rey let go of long before her childhood was over. Notions of love and romance he always wanted; he’d wanted to give them to her.

She presses a gentle kiss to his chin. “It was perfect.”

His brows scrunch together in a frown. “No, I had all these plans to make it right for you. Not like this.”

Rey understands him now, better than she ever thought she could. He became Kylo because he couldn’t trust himself to make the right choices—didn’t believe himself possible of doing the right thing. And that means he’ll always believe he’s done the wrong thing, no matter what. It’s going to be a hard habit to break him out of.

“We can do that later,” she tells him, shimmying down his body as he releases her. “It’s not the only time we’re ever going to be together—so we can do it in all kinds of ways.”

His frown hasn’t eased. “I wasn’t gentle. I can feel it.”

“I’m sore,” she admits. “But I’ve had worse. And—” She’s not sure how to explain it. Her underwear is damp, and she can feel the situation getting worse. 

It’s another impression he lifts from her head, and one that has an unexpected effect on him: nostrils flaring, jaw slackening. 

“It’s me,” he tells her, and now he sounds wonderstruck again. “That you can feel. I’m still inside you, even now.”

Oh. He likes the idea.  _ Really _ likes the idea.

“I’m going to feel you every step I take for the rest of the day,” she says.

“Even during the ceremony.” He’s not smug, exactly. Just thrilled with the situation, now he’s seen it from a new angle. “More than the words we exchange, I’m going to be part of you.”

She doesn’t roll her eyes. Even if she should. “Hmm. If we want to make it to the ceremony, you really should get ready.”

When Leia returns, Rey is downstairs and Kylo is still up in the bedroom. They can pretend they haven’t seen each other, like Leia suggested, but Leia must know they’ve done more than look at each other. The hitch of her eyebrow at Rey’s unbound hair—now smoothed down—confirms as much.

“Your ride is outside,” Leia tells her.

“I’m not traveling with you?”

“No, you’re supposed to arrive separately. I’ll be going with Ben.”

Rey doesn’t have the chance to say goodbye to him in person, sending a note of farewell down their bond instead, before she steps out into the front yard.

Idling beyond the gate is a road speeder, big enough to seat four people. The rear door is open and she clambers in, blinking around at the dimness inside as the door snicks shut behind her.

“Good to see you, kid,” Han says from the driver’s seat.

“Han!” 

“Leia told me to keep the hood up so I didn’t mess up your hair.”

She can’t hug him, no matter how sharp and sweet the delight at seeing him is—alive, whole, apparently fine. He’ll lose control of the speeder if she does.

“Are those tears?” he asks. “Seems a bit much, it’s only been a day or so.”

Chewie yowls in agreement from the seat beside Han.

“To you, maybe,” Rey mumbles. “I’ve got so much to tell you. Later. Are you my witness?”

“I’ve got somebody else who wants that honor, but honestly, I’m not sure if he’ll go through with it.”

Rey doesn’t have to be confused about that for long—they haven’t traveled far along the coast road before they pull up at the water’s edge, where a jetty leads out into the ocean. The sun hangs low and fat over the water, already the shade of a ripe peach ready to be plucked from the bough, and the waves below it are peaceful and turquoise. 

Waiting on the esplanade is Finn.

Rey launches herself out of the speeder and into his arms. “You came!”

“Of course I came.” He doesn’t let go when she tries to pull back. “Rey, what is going on? You can’t be serious!”

“I am,” she insists, wriggling out of his grip. “Completely.”

And she finds herself telling the story once more. In much more truncated terms this time, as Han and Chewie listen in. Then she hugs the pair of them for good measure.

“Now, are you going to be my witness?” she asks Finn.

“If you’re sure about this.” He doesn’t look happy, but he also hasn’t had his back carved up in a lightsaber duel with Kylo, so maybe he’s more willing to forgive. She nods firmly. “Then I will.”

“Good,” she says, beaming.

Another speeder approaches, and Han straightens. “That’s them. We should wait in the speeder.”

Finn climbs in with her, and Rey fidgets as the other speeder stops closer to the jetty. She sees three figures get out of it—Leia, another woman, and then Kylo looming over both of them. He’s in dark robes—not black, but close. They head down the jetty, and that’s when Han ushers them out to follow them.

The jetty itself is bursting with flowers, lined with blooms in clashing colors all the way down to the end: feather lilies and snowblooms, palomellas and Malreux roses. When she glances up, Kylo is gazing back at her, waiting for her reaction to them. She rewards him with a bright smile—he must have noticed her admiring them in the market yesterday.

The sky now matches the path of flowers, streaked in coral, mauve, and violet. The ocean is a spectrum flecked with white, and it helps Rey realize that Kylo’s robes are actually a rich, deep blue. It suits him. The way his lips are parted, the way his gaze tracks her body, reminds her of how he’d moved within her not an hour ago, and she flushes. She feels an answering pang of longing from him.

The woman who’d arrived with Kylo and Leia is stood with her back to the ocean, behind a small table also piled with flowers. She’s in a silvery-white robe and a crown of feathery blonde hair. Kylo is stood in front of the table to one side, and Leia has paused several feet away from them. Finn, Han, and Chewie come to a stop next to Leia and urge her forwards to where Kylo is waiting.

She’s barely level with him before he’s grasping her hand. The blonde woman, who introduces herself as the officiant, smiles at both of them.

“Shall we begin?”

Kylo’s nervous; there’s a tremor in his hand and a shakiness to his breath as he nods at her. But Rey—Rey is calm. Perfectly calm, and she throws open her shields to make sure Kylo can feel it, and lend her peace to him.

Words are exchanged, vows repeated after the officiant. They don’t speak of love, but of more sober promises: truth and honesty, fidelity, protection and care. Promises Rey can make without hesitation. Kylo doesn’t even flinch when he’s repeatedly referred to as Ben Solo, his legal identity. 

Leia and Finn are called to make vows of their own, swearing that they each know Kylo and Rey and that they’re entering into the union for good reasons. Finn hesitates for a second, but whatever he sees in Rey’s face has him raising his hand to swear.

And finally.

“Ben Solo and Rey of Jakku—go forth as one.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks go, as always, to my beta reylonging.

The sun is swallowed at the edge of the world in a blaze of gold, disappearing into the endless indigo water that stretches out to the horizon. Somewhere above a sliver of moon hangs, and bursts of stars cluster in a sky the same color as the ocean below it.

The galaxy feels peaceful around them. Rey feels whole, the dyad feasting on the vows she’s exchanged with Kylo and singing a crystalline note of serenity.

Leia steps forward, slipping a chain over her head and handing it to Kylo. Dangling in the place of a pendant is a golden ring, and Kylo cuts a glance of exasperation at his mother.

“You were wearing it all this time?”

“Close to my heart. Always.”

He begins to unclasp the chain, but Rey stops him. “No, I want to wear it that way as well.”

“You do?”

She thinks of how much that gold would be worth on Jakku. Of how difficult it would be to keep it safe—and she knows they aren’t going back to Jakku. Ever. But old habits die hard, and this is something Kylo obviously treasures a great deal. It needs to be treated with respect and care, and she can’t think of a better way than Leia’s, hidden under her clothing.

“I’d be too afraid of damaging it on my hands—but like that, it’d be safer. And close to my heart too.”

“Very well.” She hopes he understands all of her reasons. The way he doesn’t argue, gently slipping the chain over her head and then tucking the ring inside her dress, makes her think he does. She smiles up at him, enjoying the closeness of him and the way the fire of the sunset has turned his dark eyes amber. He really does look good in blue.

“What do we do now?” she asks.

“We eat,” interrupts Han, echoed by Chewie.

“We dance,” says Leia.

Kylo scowls. “No, we do not dance.” His face softens. “But we do eat.”

Eating requires them to return to the house, where every flat surface in the living room has got food on it, piping hot and delivered from the markets.

“Normally there’d be a feast, but there’s only us,” Kylo tells her when they step inside.

“This isn’t a feast?”

“Not by Chandrilan standards.”

Their four wedding guests have followed them back to the house, and Chewie tucks into the food with as much gusto as Rey. The flowers have been brought back too, crammed into the back of Han’s rented speeder and then carried inside to spill across the floor.

Han produces a bottle of Daruvvian champagne from one of his secret hiding places and hands around flutes of it. Kylo declines one, but Rey sips at hers delicately, enjoying the tart bubbles flowing across her tongue.

She pauses with a mouthful of spiceloaf when Leia sidles up to her.

“It’s been a wonderful day,” Leia enthuses. “I’m so glad I got the chance to be part of it.”

Kylo picks at his plate of smoked nerf and doesn’t reply. Rey hastily tries to swallow.

Leia continues anyway. “I know you don’t intend to hang around here, so there’s one last thing I’d like to do before you leave. It was traditional on Alderaan for newlyweds to be given gifts from their families for good luck. Not new items but things they already owned, sharing heirlooms to welcome spouses to the family. In honor of that tradition, I’d like to give you the  _ Tantive IV _ .”

“You know you can’t buy my affection like that,” Kylo tells Leia stiffly.

“I know, that’s why I’m giving it to her.” That shuts Kylo up. 

“Your ship?” Rey asks. “But I already have your mother’s ring!”

“Please, it’s an old rustbucket. It needs so much work you’d be doing me a favor taking it off my hands.”

“A rustbucket? It’s a Corellian corvette! I know they typically only have a Class 2 hyperdrive but it wouldn’t take much to upgrade it to something more powerful, and I guarantee I’ve fixed up worse on Jakku.” She smiles at Leia, wide enough that she can feel it start to hurt her cheeks. “You’re really giving me a ship? Nobody’s ever given me anything like that before!”

Kylo’s expression has gone positively lethal, but when his gaze slips over Rey, something changes. He softens before her eyes, and she feels the change through the bond too—him slipping from a strange, jealous hurt to something tender.

“It means you’ll be under the protection of the Resistance wherever you travel,” Leia continues. “And you won’t have any excuses not to come visit me when you start a family.”

Kylo’s eyes practically bulge out of his head. “Don’t presume anything,” he snips at her, but he can’t mask how he feels to Rey. There’d been a flicker of hope at the thought of family. And given what they’d done earlier…

“I guess I presumed wrongly.” But her knowing smile has Kylo sputtering indignantly when Leia waves Finn over to them. 

“Now, technically we’re just giving these back to you, Rey, though one does belong to our family.”

“My staff!” Rey says, taking it from Finn. “And is that—”

“Anakin’s lightsaber,” Leia confirms.

“That belongs to me,” Kylo says, reaching out for it, but Rey lightly slaps his hand away.

“It called to me,” she reminds him.

“Because of our bond.”

“You don’t know that. And besides, I don’t have a lightsaber right now, and we just blew up the best source of kyber crystals in the galaxy. I’ll need this.”

He stares at her levelly. “We’ll discuss this later.”

“Yes, we will,” she tells him serenely.

Since they never really unpacked the new clothes they purchased yesterday, transferring their belongings to Han’s speeder is a quick process, along with the remainder of the food parceled into plast-foam containers. Their group can’t all fit inside the speeder, so Chewie offers to shuttle Kylo and Rey to their new-old ship.

Kylo hesitates on the threshold, looking like he’s going to leave without saying goodbye to his parents, but also incapable of stepping across without looking back at them. Rey makes a big deal of hugging all of them on his behalf.

“Take good care of my boy,” Leia murmurs into her hair.

“I will,” Rey promises.

“If he does anything to hurt you—” Finn swears.

“He won’t.”

“The job offer is always open, kid,” Han says, and he’s looking as much at Kylo as Rey when he does. 

Kylo shuffles his feet and looks away. “Don’t you have a war to end?”

“Not me!” Han replies with a grin.

Leia nods gravely. “I can’t make any promises about where I’ll be, but you are always welcome to visit. Both of you.”

Kylo swallows, a wave of wistfulness passing through him. Rey takes his arm, and they head outside, into the back of the speeder together. Han, Leia, and Finn follow them out to see them off, Han and Leia standing arm in arm until they disappear from view.

Rey’s filled with giddy happiness knowing that she  _ will _ see them again.

When they’re comfortable, Kylo takes her hand in his. Low, in his lap, where Chewie can’t see it, his giant fingers enveloping hers and his thumb stroking her skin in a gentle, soothing rhythm.

He’s content. 

It’s a curious feeling. Like the maelstrom inside him has paused. She squeezes his hand back and watches the waves crashing against the shore, their foam silver in the moonlight.

They pass through the little town, and all the stalls have been cleared away, the shops shuttered and dark. But the cantinas are well-lit and thriving, patrons staggering out and mingling merrily. The hangar on the edge of town is quiet, despite the relatively early hour, but a few staff remain to help them arrange their journey out of here.

The  _ Tantive IV _ gleams in the low lighting, a white beacon among the shadows. Even if she does have dents and scrapes in her hull, she’s beautiful to Rey’s eyes. Her very own ship. 

She’s much bigger than the Falcon and should require more crew—but Kylo  _ is _ the son of Han Solo. They make it work between them, lifting off and soaring out over the ocean, a pool of black-ink below them, before they breach the atmosphere. From above, the shrinking sight of Chandrila is as captivating as it was when they arrived, and she makes Kylo promise to bring her back one day.

He does. He gets them into lightspeed, charting an autopilot course to somewhere new. And then he takes her to the nearest quarters.

The sleeper in here is plenty big enough for both of them, the sheets softer than any she’s ever slept in when he presses her down onto the mattress. Then he tugs her underwear down and away, kneeling beside the sleeper to gaze at the mess he left between her legs earlier. 

Now, he’s smug.

But he’s also gentle, crawling over her to kiss her into a frenzy, slowly stripping the dress away to leave her bare beneath him. She helps him strip as well, layers of robes peeled away and discarded on the floor to reveal so much pale skin. She forgot how big he really is, twice as broad as her, and though he thinks he has scars they’re nothing compared to what should be there; his side clear of the bowcaster wound, his collarbone smooth and unmarred. She maps the empty spaces with her hands and lips, and learns the scars she’s never seen up close. He’s warm, even feverish, and his muscles tense and cord under her explorations.

She’s still sore from earlier, and he’s still uncomfortably large. In all ways. When he covers her, his shoulders block out the entire room, cocooning her so all her senses are filled with Kylo, and Kylo alone. His heat, his scent—soap and salty sweat—and the quiet sounds he’s making deep in his throat. She drinks all of it in, wrapping her arms around his torso as best she can and pulling him close.

It’s like the first time, the two of them merging together: waves cresting and breaking against the shore then retreating back into the ocean, again and again, until it’s impossible to tell if that wave is him or her or both of them become one. Even when it’s over, Kylo collapsing onto her with a thundering heart and spent muscles, his mind is wide open to hers. She drifts, curled up in his arms, spilling light into the dark spaces wherever she goes.

But it isn’t long before he begins to retreat, pulling away from her mentally so she doesn’t get too close to the darkest parts of him. 

* * *

They have no destination in particular. Sometimes Kylo chooses, sometimes she does. Places he’s been and places she’s heard of and never thought she’d get to see. They avoid the Core Worlds, and anywhere that has remnants of the First Order resisting its defeat. 

They never linger anywhere for more than a few standard days, just in case anyone is on Kylo’s tail. It’s plenty of time to see a wealth of landscapes—every forest or sea different from the last, and Rey discovers there are deserts she doesn’t hate, cracked salt plains and ice fields as desolate as Jakku but beautiful in their own way. There are new foods to try in every place and Rey never turns any of it down, even if it leaves Kylo disgusted as she eagerly gobbles down a cooked Giant Ithorian snail.

She tinkers with the ship, starting with the core systems to begin with. She does a thorough cataloging of every last part of it, then compiles a list of the changes she wants to make. Upgrading the hyperdrive will be one of the last things she’ll do, and will require them to be in one place for a while longer. She’ll also need credits, but Kylo never seems concerned about running out of those. He’s a good assistant—not as good at mechanics as she is, but he takes instruction well. Which is a miracle. Mostly he seems content to sit and listen to her ramble about all of her plans. She’ll catch him gazing at her, eyes affectionate and mouth slanting upwards in a half-contained smile.

He helps her relearn the Force and she tries to regain the ground she lost going back in time. It’s a balance, him still frustrated with her Light, her annoyed whenever he retreats from that Light, scuttling away like the Jakku creatures from the sun at dawn. But it’s also difficult to concentrate when most of his thoughts in her presence are about her—memories of them coming together, fervent imaginings of how they might come together again. And they’re doing a lot of it, in ways the Jedis would definitely never have sanctioned.

In the sleeper, obviously. Him above her, her above him, him behind her. His mouth between her legs, often, and wasn’t that a revelation. In the sonic; in the cockpit; up against every wall on the ship. And then every night, curling up together like they’re still in that narrow cot on Chandrila instead of in a diplomat’s sleeper big enough to fit two Kylos in. 

They kiss plenty, too. Sweet and tame or messy and hungry, and everything in between. Rey thinks his mouth was made for kissing, and her mouth was made for kissing his.

Their only point of contention is Anakin’s lightsaber. They’re each carrying one by unspoken agreement wherever they go, because there is a war on, and Kylo’s plush mouth settles into a pout whenever Rey clips the saber into the concealed holster on her belt. 

“You can have it,” she tells him, “so long as I can use yours instead.”

“No—mine’s too unstable to respond to anyone but me.”

Which has her rolling her eyes and reminding him she has wielded it before, briefly. And if he doesn’t want her using either saber, she’ll just have to keep carrying her staff around instead, which makes their journey feel less like a honeymoon and more like she’s expecting a fight.

It’s the fifth time they have this conversation that she gets fed up. “Look, what if I heal the crystal in your saber?”

That makes him pause. “You can do that?”

“Yes,” she says, more confidently than she feels. “I did when the crystal in Anakin’s saber was cleaved in two. Yours is only cracked. If I heal it, it’ll be mine.”

“Be my guest.”

They settle onto a forest moon for a few days so she has the peace to concentrate on her task. Though she’s used Kylo’s saber before, it still doesn’t trust her, the kyber stinging against her touch like an angry bluebarb wasp. Anakin’s broken crystal had been inert, peacefully allowing her to meditate and work on bringing it back into one piece. This lashes out at her every time she prods it with the Force.

“I can make it work,” she tells Kylo, “but I need your help. It was your anger that cracked it, so I think I need your Force signature to heal it.”

The crystal does calm down in Kylo’s presence, pulsing with energy that’s a lot like his. But it still shrinks away from her, untrusting.

They’re sat facing each other, the saber between them on the ground, trying to meditate. 

“We need to pool our energy,” she says. “And use the dyad to do this.”

He eyes her warily. “How?”

“Like when we’re together and we sort of blend together—like that.”

He’s dubious, and although he lets her take his hand, she can feel his reluctance to drop his guard. Even when he lets her in, like he had back on Starkiller Base, there’s a veil over the deepest parts of him. The crystal responds in kind.

“You still don’t trust me.”

“I trust you.”

“No. You’re afraid of letting me in. Ben, I don’t get it. I married you, I made all those vows. I thought we were past this.”

But he only presses his lips together and changes the subject. It’s not that he’s pulling away, so much as he seems to be waiting for her to; he eagerly dives into her mind whenever he has the chance, like he’s memorizing her, the same way he’s carefully studying her body.

So they leave that moon and move on.

They make it to Pasaana for the Festival of the Ancestors. Kylo doesn’t dance, his large, gray-draped form awkwardly watching her spin around with the Aki-Aki, but he does buy her skewers of sweetmallow to feast on and a sunshine-yellow kern-nut necklace. He rents a little shack on the edge of the desert for them to spend the night in, and they ensure the ancestors don’t get a wink of sleep.

The festival marks the end of a standard month since they left Chandrila, and Rey hasn’t put much thought into what they’ll do next. 

She discovers Kylo has put perhaps too much thought into it.

“We can keep traveling, right?” she asks him. “For now. Until things are settled, we can keep exploring the galaxy.”

He studies her face. “You want that?”

“Of course I do.”

So they keep going. Seeing new worlds, trying new foods—or at least Rey does—and learning about the Force. For the first time, somebody is able to teach her proper lightsaber forms, while Rey tries to explain the theorems she’d seen in the old texts to an eager Kylo.

It’s on Maridun that the news of the armistice comes. The holonet is awash with it as they explore a town built into a meteor crater, Leia’s triumphant face the feature of every broadcast.

“The First Order has been defeated,” her voice rings, “though not without tragic loss of life. We must now focus on rebuilding in a way to stop the tide of darkness from being able to ever rise like that again.”

In the absence of anyone else to lead the rebuilding efforts, the task once again falls to Leia. She has to give press conferences to outline her plans, and that gives scope for reporters to ask impertinent questions.

“General Organa, what do you have to say in response to the rumors that your son was part of the First Order and only defected when their defeat was imminent?”

Leia stares down the camera with her customary fire. “I would say my son is a brave man whose actions during this conflict saved millions, if not billions of lives. I cannot overstate how proud I am of Ben.”

When Rey glances up at Kylo, his eyes are brimming with tears. She leads him back to the ship where they climb into the sleeper, fully clothed, wrapped up tightly together while he struggles to process what he’s seen.

Later, he’s slow and ferocious in equal measure.

She broaches their future over breakfast the next morning. 

“Now the war’s over, maybe we should think about finding somewhere to settle down. I like traveling and we can keep doing that, but I want somewhere we can think of as home too.”

He stills. Staring at her, unblinking, like if he breathes too hard it will shatter the spell.

“Do you not want that?”

“I-I do. Of course I do.”

They toss plans back and forth. Do they want to go back to somewhere they’ve already been? Rey wouldn’t mind Chandrila, but Ben is less keen, even if it is his homeworld. He wants somewhere that is new and fresh for both of them. He suggests Coruscant, but within a few hours there Rey knows she could never consider it home. It’s too busy, too synthetic. 

“We’ll keep looking,” he says, and she’s okay with that.

Though she’s always called him Ben out loud, it takes her time to realize she’s started considering him Ben, rather than Kylo. The shift is subtle, brought about by him. His body language is looser now—he doesn’t stomp or stalk everywhere, his gait more relaxed. He’s started smiling. Frequently, even if it’s only because she’s beaming at something they’re looking at and he’s watching her with an enraptured gaze, that pout tugged upwards. She showers him with kisses when it happens, encouraging even more.

He even reveals a sense of humor. Goofy, the jokes of an adolescent boy, but it delights her all the same. 

Their trip to Naboo is a surprise, one of his. One she loves when they begin their descent down over all that greenery. Ben hires a speeder, taking her on a tour of the planet’s many waterfalls and lakes.

“I believe we still own land here, somewhere. My grandmother’s estates.”

“We could look for it.”

Maybe they will. Maybe there’s a house surrounded by overgrown gardens waiting to be tamed back to their glory days. She doesn’t need a lot, but she thinks she wants that garden. And she thinks they need to pick somewhere to settle soon, because Leia’s hints about about the consequences of their honeymoon are probably going to come true. It’s not like either of them have made any effort to prevent it.

They park the ship near a set of horseshoe falls which thunder down over a cliff and into the valley below. Rey finds the valley peaceful, despite the noise from the falls, and heads out in the mornings to meditate under the rainbows which bounce off the spray. Ben joins her, shirtless, clad only in loose pants that fall low on his hips. Even his feet are bare on the grass. His hair has grown long enough that it brushes his shoulders, and she’s in no hurry to ask him to cut it. 

He puts his saber crystal down before her, then sits opposite her cross-legged. “I think we need to try this again.”

She raises an eyebrow at him. “Are you anticipating more war?”

He shrugs. “I am Han Solo’s son. I’m sure I’ll stumble into trouble sooner or later.”

They clasp hands above the crystal, eyes closed. Rey shifts the thin curtain that separates the two of them—she’s practiced at it now, always ready to let him inside.

He’s still tentative, but as she creeps inside him, he doesn’t shrink away. It’s like he’s holding his breath, gradually releasing it the deeper she goes.

There are shadows. Of course there are; there’s a vein of darkness in him that will always be there. But the same can be said for her. His is bigger, more deeply rooted, but she’s not looking to rip it out of him. It’s part of him. She wants to understand it, as he can help her understand her own darkness.

This is who he is right now. Her counterbalance in the Force. They’ll learn together, grow together, and it doesn’t matter if the Dark is always present. So is the Light, and she’ll always be here to light his way out of the darkness if he needs her to.

_ My Rey of light. _

Even now, even here in this sacred space between them, he makes bad jokes.

_ Ben _ . A smile as much as his name.

His next thought is a feeling more than words. Love. He loves her. He’s known it for a while, suspected it for even longer. He’s been afraid with it because it’s her greatest weapon against him—if she wanted to use that to harm him, she could, and he’d be defenseless. Only her decision to settle down and build a home with him has convinced him that she’s not going anywhere. She doesn’t want to hurt him. 

He’s accepted that, finally.

The dyad is shining, a rainbow within them, ringing its happiness like a thousand bells.

He takes control this time, guiding their combined energy down into the kyber crystal. Gently, ever so gently, they find its broken, ragged edges and soften them, coaxing them back together. All the way the bond between them hums a chord, his deep tone below her lighter one.

The crystal responds. Reluctantly, but it knows Ben. His darkness and his Light. And Rey is able to direct her own energy—her hope, mostly—into it, leaving Ben to retreat away and allow the crystal to become hers. As much as it ever can be. They are a dyad, after all.

She opens her eyes. The crystal is floating between them, whole, sparkling and reflecting the morning light.

“It worked!”

He opens his eyes, but doesn’t look at the crystal, only her. Smiling the brightest she’s ever seen him. 

“I know.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for coming along on this ride and for all of your lovely comments!
> 
> I may, if I have enough time in quarantine, write some of this from Kylo's POV and also do some vignettes from their future.
> 
> I am working on a longer multi-chapter story which I currently have around 15,000 words written. It's called The Path to Broken Stars and is a retelling of Eros and Psyche in a semi-medieval, semi-steampunk fantasy world. It also has elements of Beauty and the Beast, and Hades and Persephone. If this excites you, please follow me on here or [on Tumblr](https://cellar-darlings.tumblr.com/). I'm going to aim to keep to a regular schedule for that story and will post the prologue in the next month.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm going to try and keep to a weekly update schedule with this one so see you all in a week *crosses fingers*


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